Google is paying a higher price for its bet on AI than even Alphabet’s $51. 4 billion in Q3 capital expenditures suggest. The biz appears to have traded its high-performing search advertising business for the mediocre monetization of AI Overviews and AI Mode, a misstep that contributed to investor concerns as Alphabet lost roughly $500 billion in market value despite management’s attempts to reassure Wall Street. Google’s year-over-year search revenue growth slowed from 17 percent in Q2 to 12 percent in Q3 . It’s still headed in the right direction, but at a slower rate. During Alphabet’s conference call for investors, Douglas Anmuth from JPMorgan Chase & Co asked whether that’s because Google is showing fewer ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode than it shows in its traditional search results. Chief business officer Philipp Schindler cited several reasons for that: foreign exchange rates, Europe’s elimination of its customs-duty exemption, and "the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode." To compensate, Google said it is expanding the distribution of AI Overview ads and adding multiturn ads in the US for AI Mode queries. But some Google Ads customers appear to be more concerned about quality than quantity. In a social media post , Max Anderson, CEO of OnlyFinder, complained that Google has responded to declining search volumes by attempting to manufacture revenue growth through "short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics," such as charging advertisers more for lower-quality clicks, including clicks on search terms they had not agreed to target. Eric Seufert, an analyst with Mobile Dev Memo, dismissed the doomsayers in a blog post . "It’s tempting to look at the successive deceleration in Search revenue growth from Q1 2026 as a response to pressure from other chatbots and to assume that Search query volume is migrating elsewhere," he wrote…