Alphabet shares fell about 13% on Thursday, October 29, 2026, a day after the Google parent reported third-quarter results, putting roughly $500 billion of market value at stake, according to Yahoo Finance's market report. On the earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai described where search is going: one experience that combines AI Overviews, AI Mode and traditional Search, with much longer queries. For brands, the effect is a short list of named answers in place of ten links.
What did Alphabet report in the third quarter?
Alphabet reported third-quarter revenue of $127.6 billion, up 25% from a year earlier, and Google Cloud revenue of $30.7 billion, up 103%, according to Fortune and Alphabet's own earnings highlights.
Earnings per share came in at $2.12 against a consensus of about $3, capital spending reached $51.4 billion, and free cash flow was negative $9.1 billion for a second straight quarter, Benzinga reported.
Yahoo Finance estimated the one-day loss at about $496 billion during Thursday trading. That drop would be the second-largest for a U.S.-listed company, behind Nvidia's roughly $593 billion on January 27, 2025, and far above Alphabet's previous worst of about $275 billion on July 23, 2026. The figures were moving during the session, so the closing number may differ.
What did Sundar Pichai say about where search is going?
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, said on the October 28 earnings call that Google is building one experience across AI Overviews, AI Mode and traditional Search, according to Pichai's prepared remarks.
Queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches, Pichai said, and one in five AI Mode searches globally uses voice, images or documents. Google has passed 50 billion visual searches a month.
Pichai also said Google is bringing agentic features, such as booking reservations and making purchases, to Search, and that the Gemini app has reached one billion users. Pichai called the Gemini app the fastest-growing product in Google's history.
Is AI search hurting Google's search business?
Alphabet's figures show search revenue still growing, though more slowly: Search and other advertising revenue rose 12% to about $63.3 billion, down from 17% growth in the second quarter, according to Alphabet's Q2 and Q3 earnings remarks.
Pichai said Google's year-over-year query growth rate is the highest in five years. Philipp Schindler, Alphabet's chief business officer, said ads are being scaled in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and, according to Yahoo Finance's call summary, that lower monetization in AI Mode weighed on search growth during the quarter.
Taken together, the call indicates that people are searching more while Google earns less, so far, on some of those AI answers. That is an inference from the reported figures, not a statement Alphabet made.
What does this mean for PR and communications teams?
A brand that is not named in an AI answer is missing from the buyer shortlist, and longer search questions make that shortlist shorter.
Retrieval systems select the pages an answer is built from, and a page is more likely to be selected when independent publications, community discussions and the brand's own site state the same facts consistently. Independent coverage gives a system plain sentences it can quote, which is why earned media and media relations matter to AI visibility.
Google has stated it will sell ads inside those answers. Paid placement is expected to sit alongside independent coverage rather than replace it, because the answer itself is built from sources the retrieval system selects.
Communications work carries a technical consequence in generative search: a retrieval system repeats what it finds, so an inaccurate claim in a release or on a company page can reappear in answers long after publication. The generative engine optimization framework covers how teams check for that risk.
How can a team measure whether AI answers name its brand?
A team can measure whether AI answers name its brand by running the same 20 customer questions through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot every month and recording three specific results.
- Whether the brand is named in each answer.
- Which publications and pages each answer cites.
- Whether what the tool says about the brand is accurate.
Placement counts and impressions do not show any of these results, so they should sit beside the monthly count rather than replace it. Because answer engines can answer the same question differently, the count should be repeated across tools and months before identifying a trend. More on the platforms themselves is in the answer engines coverage.
