Google reported its earnings today, its Q1 2026 earnings report showed ad revenues up by 15.5% at $77.3 billion and overall revenue was up 22% at $109.9 billion. I specifically like to dig in as best as I can on the ad revenue side to see how Google Ads have performed.
Google's ad revenue was up again year-over-year, with an increase of 13.6%, and overall revenue is also up 17%. Microsoft reported earnings tonight as well, its ad revenue grew 12%.
If you want to compare Q1 2026 to Q4 2025, you will see ad revenue was down 6%, overall revenue was down 3.5% and profit was up 10.5%%. But Q4 is always Google's strongest quarter.
Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, said:
2026 is off to a terrific start. Our AI investments and full stack approach are lighting up every part of the business. Search had a strong quarter with AI experiences driving usage, queries at an all time high, and 19% revenue growth. Google Cloud revenues grew 63% with backlog nearly doubling quarter on quarter to over $460 billion. This was our strongest quarter ever for our consumer AI plans, driven by the Gemini App. Overall the number of paid subscriptions has now reached 350 million, with YouTube and Google One being the key drivers. Gemini Enterprise has great momentum with 40% quarter on quarter growth in paid monthly active users. And, finally, I’m pleased to see Waymo surpass 500,000 fully autonomous rides a week.These outstanding results are built on our differentiated, full stack approach. Our first-party models, like Gemini, are now processing more than 16 billion tokens per minute via direct API use by our customers, up 60% from last quarter.
It’s really exciting to see how our AI investments are delivering value for our users, customers and business.
Here is a chart plotting Google's overall revenue, then ad revenue and then profit over the past several quarters:
Here is the snippet from the earnings report:
Highlights from Google earnings:
- Consolidated Alphabet revenues increased 22%, or 19% in constant currency, to $109.9 billion, reflecting strong performance across the business and our 11th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.
- Google Services revenues increased 16% to $89.6 billion, led by 19% growth in Google Search & other, 19% in Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices, and 11% in YouTube ads.
- Google Cloud saw a meaningful acceleration in growth as revenues increased 63% to $20.0 billion, led by an increase in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) across enterprise AI Solutions and enterprise AI Infrastructure, as well as core GCP services.
- Consolidated Alphabet operating income increased 30% and operating margin expanded by 2 percentage points to 36.1%.
- Other income reflected a net gain of $37.7 billion, primarily the result of net unrealized gains on our nonmarketable equity securities.
- Net income increased 81% and EPS increased 82% to $5.11.
- The company announced a 5% increase to the dividend, resulting in a quarterly cash dividend of $0.22.
Q1 earnings are in: 2026 is off to a terrific start.
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) April 29, 2026
Our AI investments and full stack approach are lighting up every part of the business: Search queries are at an all-time high with AI continuing to drive usage. Google Cloud revenue grew 63%, Gemini models have incredible… pic.twitter.com/ysZ5CYAUPR
Forum discussion at X.
