Search ad growth slowdown pushes Google to internationalize, a commercial bet on conversational queries

Alphabet’s revenue of $127.6 billion in Q3, with annual growth of 25 percent, did not spare the company’s share from an 8 percent drop immediately after the results were announced. The direct cause was the slowdown in growth of traditional search ads, as the annual growth rate fell to 12 percent, compared with about 17 percent in Q2 and 19 percent in Q1. This slowdown placed explicit pressure on Google’s management, prompting it to accelerate the internationalization of AI ads in global markets for the first time, betting on turning smart-generation features into a direct financial revenue stream to offset the waning historical momentum.

Phil Schindler, Google’s senior business officer, announced an expansion of ads within smart summaries and AI mode toward multiple international markets, alongside multi-turn ads in the United States. The move relied on early test results indicating that click-through rates on product listings supported by ads in AI mode now match those of natural listings, and that user research points to the suitability of those links for answer context. This policy builds on what the company announced last May regarding advertising formats that use Gemini models, including conversational discovery ads and recommendations embedded within generative answers.

This internationalization coincided with a fundamental shift in search behavior, as Sundar Pichai, the company’s CEO, revealed that search queries posted the fastest annual growth rate in five years, while usage patterns changed. Queries in AI mode have become three times longer than traditional search, and one in five searches in this mode worldwide now uses voice, images, or documents, with visual searches exceeding 50 billion queries per month. The quarter also saw the launch of the Gemini 4 Argon model, Gemini reaching one billion monthly active users, and a 103 percent jump in cloud computing revenue to $30.7 billion, versus $96.3 billion for the services segment including search.

This global shift transmits its financial and operational impact directly to the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant markets, where institutions and digital commerce platforms rely on search ads as a primary marketing channel. Moving ads to conversational summaries forces marketers in Riyadh, Dubai and Cairo to redesign budgets, as buying single keywords no longer suffices to capture purchase intent, and teams must refine product listings to match complex, long queries and multi-turn conversations. Moreover, the rise of visual and document search raises the cost of competing for those who have organized, multi-media digital content, making the ability to adapt commerce catalogs to generative answers a survival benchmark, rather than relying on traditional tactics.

I see Google’s expansion into these advertising spaces as a step that redefines the consumer’s relationship with information and spending.The search engine is no longer a traditional link interface; it has become a conversational intermediary that embeds commercial offers within the core of the smart answer.Today you face a strategic reality that demands a review of your digital tools, because delaying the understanding of long-form queries will mean paying a higher cost to reach the same customer.