Welcome to the week’s Pulse: updates affect the legal footing of the SERP tools you rely on, what it’s worth to keep your content in Google’s index, and where the revenue behind Search is heading.
Here’s what matters for you and your work.
Search Revenue Grows 17%; Pichai Points To Gemini 4
Alphabet reported Q2 2026 earnings, with Google Search & other revenue up 17% year over year to $63.27 billion. The growth rate eased from 19% in Q1, the first slowdown after four quarters of acceleration. On the earnings call, Pichai pointed to Gemini 4, now in pretraining, as the model Google needs to compete at the frontier.
Key facts: In the earnings release, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s “popular AI features are driving Search query growth,” and Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler attributed the increase to strong vertical performance, led by retail. Alphabet also raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to $195 billion to $205 billion. In the call’s Q&A, Pichai named coding and agentic coding as areas where Google needs to improve.
Why This Matters
Search is still growing by billions a quarter, and Google credits its AI surfaces. The slowdown is one data point, not a trend, but it lands alongside another raise in spending meant to make AI the engine of a business that just grew slightly slower. How that bet plays out will shape which surfaces you optimize for and which ad formats reach your audience.
Read our full coverage:
Google Search Revenue Growth Eases After A Year Of Acceleration
Pichai Says Google Needs Gemini 4 To Compete At The Frontier
Court Dismisses Google’s DMCA Claims Against SerpApi
A federal judge dismissed Google’s DMCA claims against SerpApi, ruling that blocking automated access to public search results isn’t copyright circumvention when those results contain no copyrighted content.
Key facts: The judge granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss both anti-circumvention claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Claims based on results without copyrighted content were dismissed without leave to amend, while claims involving licensed images in results were dismissed with permission for Google to amend within 21 days. The court rejected SerpApi’s argument that Google lacked the right to sue, and found Google plausibly alleged circumvention of its SearchGuard system.
Why This Matters
Many of the tools practitioners rely on, from rank trackers to SERP monitors, depend on scraped search results, and this round mostly went their way. The court held that getting past an access control isn’t a DMCA violation when the results behind it contain no copyrighted content. Google can still amend its narrower claims, and a district court order doesn’t bind other courts. For now, the decision gives scraping-based tools language to cite.
What People Are Saying
Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, wrote on X:
“If you crawl the web, or rely on…
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