Google’s rollout of AI-powered search features appears to be defying early skepticism about their impact on the company’s advertising business, according to comments from a senior executive during the tech giant’s latest earnings call.
Philipp Schindler, Google’s Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer, told investors on October 29, 2025, that AI Overviews—the company’s AI-generated summaries that appear atop search results—are monetizing at approximately the same rate as traditional search results, even with a limited baseline of ads currently displayed.
“For AI overviews, even at our current baseline of ads, below and within the AI’s response, overall, we see the monetization at approximately the same rate,” Schindler said during the call. The comments suggest that early fears about AI fundamentally disrupting Google’s lucrative search advertising model may have been overstated.
Scaling Rapidly Across the User Base
The AI features have reached significant scale remarkably quickly. Schindler revealed that AI Overviews are now available to over 2 billion users globally, with the company continuing to expand ad placements within these AI-generated responses to more countries across both desktop and mobile platforms.
Beyond just maintaining revenue parity, Schindler indicated that these AI experiences are actually driving business growth. “Our new AI experiences… continue to drive growth in overall queries, including commercial queries, really creating more opportunities for monetization,” he explained.
The commercial query growth is particularly significant, as these searches—where users are looking to make purchases or find services—are the most valuable for advertisers and generate the highest revenue for Google.
Early Concerns Haven’t Materialized
When Google first began rolling out AI Overviews, industry observers and investors expressed concern that the feature could cannibalize the company’s core search advertising business. The worry was that if AI provided comprehensive answers directly on the search results page, users wouldn’t click through to websites, reducing the value of ad placements and potentially decreasing the number of ads Google could serve.
Those concerns appear not to have materialized, at least in these early stages. Google’s paid clicks—a key metric measuring user engagement with ads—were up 7% year-over-year, while cost-per-click (CPC), which indicates advertiser demand, also increased 7% during the same period, according to the company’s 10-Q filing.
Room for Growth
Schindler emphasized that Google is taking a measured approach to monetization, noting that the current ad load in AI Overviews represents just a “baseline.” The company sees significant upside potential as it develops “richer experiences” in AI Mode and AI Overviews, which could support “much richer placements” for advertisers.
“We manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and an attractive ROI for advertisers,” Schindler said. “We don’t really manage to pay clicks and CPC targets.”
This philosophy suggests Google is prioritizing user experience and advertiser value over short-term metrics—a strategy that appears to be paying off as the company navigates the integration of generative AI into its flagship product.
The results offer an early indication that major tech platforms may be able to successfully thread the needle of incorporating transformative AI capabilities while maintaining their existing business models, though whether this balance holds as AI features become more sophisticated remains to be seen.