Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, said on Alphabet’s third-quarter earnings call on 28 October 2026: “Today we are announcing the expansion of ads in AI Mode into international markets, alongside multi-turn ads in AI Mode in the U.S.” He called it “taking our monetization footprint global for the first time.”
He also said: “In Q3 alone, Gemini models helped advertisers generate over 1.5 billion campaign assets, up over 7x year-over-year.” By our arithmetic, an increase of more than 600% compares with 12% growth in Google Search & other revenue, which Alphabet put at $63.35 billion for the quarter.
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The key insight: As we read the call alongside Google’s protocol pages, Google is building ads in AI Mode, checkout through the Universal Commerce Protocol and agent payments through the Agent Payments Protocol in parallel, while Schindler said AI Mode’s lower monetization weighed on Search growth in the quarter.
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s chief executive, said on the call: “Queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches, and one in five AI Mode searches globally use voice, images or documents.” He said Google is “building one seamless experience across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and traditional Search.”
Schindler said that on AI Mode, “many of these queries are upper-funnel queries, allowing us to capture new high-value commercial intent. In addition, the majority of AI Mode queries are incremental, creating more monetization opportunities over time.”
How Google executives described the AI Mode ads and agentic-commerce stack on the Q3 2026 earnings call: the AI Mode query, ads in AI Mode, checkout through the Universal Commerce Protocol and payment authorisation through the Agent Payments Protocol. Sources: Alphabet Q3 2026 earnings call (28 Oct 2026); Google Developers Blog (11 Jan 2026); Google Cloud blog (16 Sep 2025).
What Was Posted on X
$GOOGL is expanding AI Mode ads internationally for the first time, with multi-turn ads coming to the U.S.
Google says most AI Mode queries are incremental, opening new monetization opportunities.
Sponsored and organic product listings already have similar CTRs in AI Mode.
Wall St Engine’s post says Google is expanding AI Mode ads internationally for the first time, with multi-turn ads coming to the US, that most AI Mode queries are incremental, and that sponsored and organic listings have similar CTRs in AI Mode.
What Google Says About Ads in AI Mode
Schindler said: “Our user research shows that people are comfortable with ads on these surfaces and find them highly relevant. Click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product list items within AI Mode.”
He added: “We are now scaling high-quality ads within AI Overviews and AI Mode to more users and queries.” He described the approach as “prioritizing the user experience and engagement first, then scaling the formats that drive proven ROI for advertisers.”
Answering JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth, Schindler named currency as “the single largest driver of search deceleration relative to Q2” and said: “It’s worth noting that the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode.”
The Commerce Layer: UCP, AP2 and Universal Cart
Schindler said: “The Universal Commerce Protocol, UCP, is being rapidly adopted by retailers. Today, UCP enables direct checkout for hundreds of thousands of brands across Google, including Chewy, Nike, Tapestry, and many more. We are combining this with the Agent Payments Protocol as we build for the future of commerce.”
Google’s Developers Blog, in a 11 January 2026 post, describes UCP as “an open-source standard designed to power the next generation of agentic commerce.” The post says it lets consumer surfaces “such as AI Mode on Search, Gemini, and others” connect to business backends, and that the business remains “the Merchant of Record.”
Google Cloud’s 16 September 2025 announcement describes the Agent Payments Protocol, AP2, as “an open protocol developed with leading payments and technology companies to securely initiate and transact agent-led payments across platforms.” It says AP2 uses mandates, “tamper-proof, cryptographically-signed digital contracts that serve as verifiable proof of a user’s instructions.”
On the shopper side, Schindler said: “We launched Universal Cart this quarter to support that second track, mirroring how people actually shop today across Google. This allows retailers to maintain their relationships with customers, while helping to capture sales and avoid abandoned carts.”
He also said Amazon is joining YouTube Shopping: “U.S. creators can now tag Amazon products directly in their videos, Shorts, and livestreams, driving direct conversions.”
How Ads Fit Agent Answers
Answering Bank of America’s Justin Post, Schindler said: “We view agentic experiences as clearly additive.” He gave an example of an agent answer: “Here is the insurance product that we found, and here’s another strong option, one of which is a higher premium, maybe a lower deductible, and they’re currently offering a very special discount.”
He went on: “Given that there’s almost never only one perfect option for a decision, we’re actually confident that we can actually provide really interesting, compelling advertising models for agentic use cases.” Pichai added that he would “view it as an expansion opportunity.”
When Agents Reach Consumers
Pichai said Google rolled agents out to businesses first with Gemini Agent for Enterprise, “because they have the highest bar for security governance and controls.” He said: “Later this year, we will bring that same experience to consumers, obviously starting with the one billion users in our Gemini app.”
He said Google is “working on distilled versions of our Carbon models, so that we can deploy it across a billion user scale efficiently.”
As we read the call, Google presented ads and agents as one track: Schindler said ads in AI Mode are scaling to more users and queries, and Pichai said agents reach Gemini app users later this year.
The executives gave no revenue figure for AI Mode ads, UCP checkouts or AP2 payments, so the size of this track is not disclosed.
By our arithmetic, Search & other revenue was $6.8 billion higher than a year earlier, at $63.35 billion.
Philipp Schindler, Alphabet Q3 2026 earnings call, 28 October 2026
“We view agentic experiences as clearly additive”
Three Implications
FOR ADVERTISERS Schindler said ads in AI Mode are expanding into international markets, alongside multi-turn ads in AI Mode in the U.S.
FOR RETAILERS Schindler said UCP enables direct checkout for hundreds of thousands of brands across Google, and that Universal Cart lets retailers maintain their relationships with customers.
FOR PAYMENTSGoogle Cloud’s AP2 announcement says mandates serve as verifiable proof of a user’s instructions to an agent.
The framework argues: “The agentic surface — the harness — is becoming where value pools in the entire AI stack.”
On the call, Pichai said agents need “a robust harness” and “a highly secure run time,” and Schindler said UCP is being combined with the Agent Payments Protocol “as we build for the future of commerce.” The framework was published in July 2026 and does not discuss these remarks.
Update, 28 Oct: the ads-engagement figures from the call
In his prepared remarks on the call, Schindler gave these figures. Product listing ads got what he called “the biggest update to product listing ads in a decade”, and he said user satisfaction rose 19% while dissatisfaction fell by more than half. He said personalisation modelling delivered 18% incremental advertiser value and an 8% increase in user sentiment on Discover ads in 2026.
He said Telstra, using AI Max to capture long-form and multilingual queries, saw a 52% increase in conversions and a 36% reduction in cost per order. On YouTube, he said Wayfair’s Demand Gen campaigns drove a 2.3 times higher return on ad spend than traditional video reach campaigns, Lexus saw an 11% lift in brand consideration working with creators, and living room viewing accounted for “over one-third of total YouTube ads revenues” in the quarter.
These figures were given by Google; they are not independently verified, and Google gave them without a common baseline or revenue effect.
What Is Not Established
Google gave no revenue figure for ads in AI Mode or AI Overviews, no count of UCP checkouts and no AP2 transaction volume. It did not name the international markets for AI Mode ads. Quotations come from a live-caption transcript of the call; the 1.5 billion assets and 7x figures are lower bounds as stated (“over”).
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On the call, Google executives described ads in AI Mode going to international markets, multi-turn ads in the U.S., direct checkout through UCP combined with AP2, and agents reaching Gemini app users later this year, while Schindler said AI Mode’s lower monetization weighed on Search growth in the quarter.
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A note on sourcing. Call quotations come from a live-caption transcript of Alphabet’s third-quarter 2026 earnings call on 28 October 2026, checked against Sundar Pichai’s published remarks where they overlap. Protocol descriptions come from Google’s Developers Blog and Google Cloud blog. The revenue figure comes from Alphabet’s results release; comparisons are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
