Google Posts $96B in Q2 Revenue, Spurred by Big AI Investments – Adweek
$96.4 billion — Alphabet’s revenue for Q2, up 14% year-over-year.
$54.1 billion — Q2 ad revenue generated by Google Search and affiliated properties like Gmail and Google Maps.
$9.8 billion — YouTube’s Q2 advertising revenue, driven primarily by direct response and brand advertising.
450 million — Monthly active users of the Gemini app.
It’s AI or bust at Google.
In Q2, the tech giant updated its family of Gemini reasoning models, rolled out a premium $249.99-per-month AI subscription offering, launched its advanced Veo 3 video-generation model and an image-to-video tool embedded within Gemini, and unveiled its browser-based AI agent Project Mariner.
The company also enhanced AI search with an AI Mode for complex searches and, of course, ads in AI Mode.
During the call with investors, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also touted the growth of AI Overviews, which are AI-generated summaries that appear on top of some search results, noting they now have over 2 million monthly active users globally.
“We know how popular AI Overviews are because they are now driving over 10% more queries globally for the types of queries that show them, and this growth continues to increase over time,” Pichai said.
This traction is necessary, as the company’s search business is facing challengers including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic, who are chipping away at Google’s dominance in web search. Last month, about 5.6% of all U.S. desktop search traffic was owned by AI engines rather than Google, according to new data from Semrush’s clickstream data company Datos.
Google has also been shuffling its AI talent as it goes full-throttle on product development.
Earlier this month it snagged Varun Mohan, cofounder of AI coding startup Windsurf, as part of a $2.4 billion talent deal, and in June named DeepMind alum Koray Kavukcuoglu its first chief AI architect. Meanwhile, the company offered buyouts to some employees within its search and ads division last month—eight months after Alphabet CFO expressed a need for cost-cutting as the company’s AI investments surge.
The company said on a call with investors in February that it plans to spend $75 billion on AI this year.
“We see AI powering an expansion in how people are searching for and accessing information, unlocking completely new kinds of questions you can ask Google,” Pichai said. “Overall queries and commercial queries on Search continue to grow year over year, and our new AI experiences significantly contributed to this increase in usage. We are also seeing that our AI features cause users to search more as they learn that search can meet more of their needs. That’s especially true for younger users.”
Kendra Barnett is Adweek’s senior tech reporter.
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