Alphabet shared its Q2 earnings this week, showing that Google Search & Other revenue increased by 17% year over year to reach $63.27 billion. For all the details, check out our earnings brief, including how the growth rate has slowed from 19% in Q1, marking the first slowdown after four quarters of accelerating growth.
The numbers also leave out part of the story. Alphabet provides a detailed breakdown of Search business earnings in its securities filing, while Google describes what the web gets back in broad assurances. Both perspectives are now part of every quarter, and the distance between them is the story.
What The Quarter Established
The revenue aspect of Search offers everything you’d hope for from a data source. Alphabet provided clear numbers, comparisons year-over-year, and consistent definitions across quarters, making it straightforward to follow the progress.
The trajectory is checkable: Search & Other growth went from 10% in Q1 2025 to 12%, then 15%, 17%, and reaching 19% in Q1 2026, before easing back to 17% this quarter.
In its earnings release, CEO Sundar Pichai connected these results to AI, saying the company’s “popular AI features are driving Search query growth.” Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler pointed out strengths across different industries, with retail leading the way, followed by finance, technology, media, and entertainment, and credited the Gemini integration within Google’s advertising systems. However, Google didn’t specify the exact contribution of each vertical.
The spending side got the same precise treatment. Roger Montti covered this, including the capital expenditures that led to negative free cash flow for the quarter.
That said, none of this detailed financial data addresses the most important question for businesses: the number of clicks to websites. Neither the Q4 2025 nor Q1 2026 reports we covered offered this information. Google’s broader claims about outbound traffic come from other sources like blog posts, interviews, and social media updates from its executives.
3 Kinds Of Claims About The Web
Google’s public statements about website traffic can be grouped into three categories. By organizing them this way, we see what kind of data each one would need to be testable.
The first group includes usage claims. In April, Pichai mentioned that “queries are at an all-time high” and repeated the query-growth link in this week’s release. In July, Nick Fox, senior vice president of Knowledge and Information, noted that Search reached its highest usage on record during a World Cup match. These claims highlight superlatives without providing specific counts. Having more queries does not mean more clicks leaving Google.
The second group involves volume claims. Fox shared in a July LinkedIn post that AI features in Search send billions of clicks to websites weekly. He also mentioned the previous daily figure: “Actually, as we’ve shared before, we…
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