As an analyst and investor, I overweight what a company says just before they report earnings. Typically it’s a moot point because companies rarely say anything material in the six weeks before reporting, given most of them impose quiet periods. That dynamic is even more in play with the biggest companies, given they’re hyper-sensitive to sending a message before earnings that may be perceived to conflict with reported results.

In my time in tech, I can’t remember a period when Google has been more aggressive with an investor charm effort. Shortly after earnings, Liz Reid reiterated how well AI Overviews is doing to increase engagement. The most recent appearance on ‘Bold Names’ upped the ante, given her comments leaned overwhelmingly positive.

The simple read: Google is going to have a good quarter in Search and continue to guide investors that they’re successfully navigating the profound shift in search.

When it comes to the competition topic, look no further than market share. In July 2023, Bing had 3% share. That increased to 3.7% in January 2025 and 4% this month. During the interview, Reid was quick to point out that competition from AI is having an impact. Specifically, Bing’s integration of ChatGPT has spurred the largest change in Search market share over the past 15 years.

Reid’s comments highlighting the steep competition likely were an effort to cover two bases. First, the reality is the world has changed: “I do think it’s the most profound shift… for Search.” She’s taking the prudent approach by reminding investors of the risk of that reality. Second, she’s talking to regulators, reminding them that Google’s virtual monopoly in Search is, at some level, at risk. Those words “profound shift” are the substance of Google’s antitrust defense.

The bottom line is Google’s share loss is too small to be of concern. Going forward, Google is doing a better job of distributing their generative AI products, which should help them retain 85% plus share, down from 90% today.

My sense is, given the optimism and timing of Liz’s comments, we should expect slight upside to the September Search estimates with growth landing at a similar 11.7% level as reported in June. If they deliver similar growth as the June quarter, that would be a win given management highlighted on the last earnings call that advertising comps get tougher in the second half of 2025 due to strong US election spending last year.

As for December, while the company does not give guidance and is light on comments that help with modeling, I expect the Street to remain around the current 11% growth outlook. One metric to keep an eye on is paid clicks. Last quarter, they surprised the Street with clicks up 4% y/y, reinforcing the narrative that AI Overviews are leading to more clicks. Philipp Schindler, Head of Sales, foreshadowed lumpiness in the click metric going forward, saying to be careful focusing too much on “paid clicks and CPCs to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics.” My guess is they don’t update that number, given before the June 2025 quarter, the last time they updated the metric was in the 2022 10-K.

A second metric we likely won’t get an update on is query growth. Last quarter they reported AI Overviews drove queries up 10% globally for the types of queries that show them, and that growth continued to increase over time.

Context is important here. That 10% query growth is related to a small segment of search results with a small base. We reviewed the last 12 transcripts and found 16 comments about queries. Unfortunately, none of them gave any meaningful insight into an apples-to-apples comparison with the 10% growth mentioned in the June quarter.

My sense is that query and click growth generally map to the same trend. On that metric, the company did provide details for 2022 showing paid clicks were up 10% y/y. In other words, the comment about queries up 10% in June 2025 is encouraging, given it suggests that dynamic has been stable over the past few years despite going up against the law of large numbers.

On the June earnings call, the company noted AI Mode had over 100 million monthly users. That compares to my estimate of 5 billion monthly Search users. That means AI Mode had 2% of the usage compared to Search. It’s a small number, but in fairness to Google, it started halfway through the June quarter. It’s available in the US and India, which account for 25% of the world’s population excluding China (where Google is not available). Adjusting for the availability, you can infer AI Mode usage is tracking closer to 8% of total Search usage, which underscores the impressive start.

In the September quarter, they added 180 countries, which means the monthly use number should have dramatically increased quarter over quarter. While going from 100m to 300m in a quarter may seem aggressive, it’s reasonable given the growing organic usage along with the geographic expansion.

If they reach the 400m monthly mark, that would imply 6% of the base is using AI Mode (which would be below the 8% implied adoption last quarter. At 400m it would be a similar 8% usage). Recall, at the bottom of an “AI Overview” result is a “Dive deeper in AI Mode” option, which means Google is funneling Search into AI Overviews into AI Mode.