Alphabet spent much of its Q1 2025 earnings call last night talking up the growth of AI Overviews, but dodged a question seeking clarity on how Google’s AI-generated answers impact click-through rates and conversion.
Why we care. Did Google decide that last night wasn’t “the moment to go into details of click-through rate and conversion and so on” because they don’t want to state what is becoming clear to most of us? That click-through rates from AI Overviews are, simply, lower? Because, on the organic side, data shows that is certainly the case (see our Dig Deeper section, below). Many websites have seen traffic decline since AI Overviews launched last May.
The exchange. An analyst from JPMorgan asked (in part):
“Can you just tell us how we should think about the 1.5 billion AI Overviews users just in terms of breadth of rollout? And I know you’re saying monetization at approximately the same rate. But what does that mean in terms of click-through rates and conversion?”
Here’s how Philipp Schindler, Alphabet’s senior vice president and chief business officer, answered:
“I don’t think this is the moment to go into the details of click-through rates and conversion and so on.”
By the numbers. Schindler once again repeated Google’s year-old claim that AI Overviews “continue to drive higher satisfaction and Search usage.” Here’s what else Alphabet shared about AI Overviews and monetization during the earnings call:
AI Overviews have “more than 1.5 billion users every month,” said Sundar Pichai, Alphabet/Google CEO.
Yes, but. Let’s be honest. AI Overviews aren’t a product that has “users.” AI Overviews are a Google Search feature. All this number means is that 1.5 billion Google Search users are served AI Overviews every month – because you can’t opt out of seeing AI Overviews.
The volume of commercial queries has increased since the launch of AI Overviews, Schindler said.
This dataless data point is based on internal Google data from January that Google previously shared in this blog post.
“For AI Overviews overall, we continue to see monetization at approximately the same rate,” Schindler said.
Schindler was asked later in the call for clarity on this monetization, but basically repeated what he said earlier in the call: “But as I talked about it before, for AI Overviews overall, we see the monetization at approximately the same rate, which gives us a strong base on which we can innovate even more.”
Google Search. More than 2 billion people use Search every day, according to Pichai, and they mentioned the 5 trillion annual searches statistic. Here’s what else was discussed related to Google Search performance in Q1:
AI Mode: “…queries are twice as long as traditional Search queries,” and Google is seeing “significant growth in multimodal queries,” Pichai said.
Circle to Search: Usage increased “nearly 40% this quarter and monthly visual searches with Lens have increased by 5 billion since October,” Pichai said.
Revenue: Google reported $66.9 billion in advertising revenue, a 10% YoY increase. This was driven primarily by financial services, insurance, retail, healthcare, and travel verticals.
Dig deeper.
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About the author
Danny Goodwin is Editorial Director of Search Engine Land & Search Marketing Expo – SMX. He joined Search Engine Land in 2022 as Senior Editor. In addition to reporting on the latest search marketing news, he manages Search Engine Land’s SME (Subject Matter Expert) program. He also helps program U.S. SMX events.
Goodwin has been editing and writing about the latest developments and trends in search and digital marketing since 2007. He previously was Executive Editor of Search Engine Journal (from 2017 to 2022), managing editor of Momentology (from 2014-2016) and editor of Search Engine Watch (from 2007 to 2014). He has spoken at many major search conferences and virtual events, and has been sourced for his expertise by a wide range of publications and podcasts.
