Meta’s Ad Revenue Nears Google Search as AI Reshapes the Advertising Race

Meta’s advertising sales grew 26% in the September quarter, compared with 12% for Google Search—but revenue growth and website traffic tell different stories.

Meta’s advertising business has moved close to Google’s core search business in quarterly revenue, highlighting how differently the two companies are navigating AI.

For the third quarter of 2026, Meta reported advertising revenue of $63.06 billion. Alphabet’s Google Search & other category generated $63.35 billion, leaving a gap of approximately $289 million.

Meta’s advertising revenue increased about 26% year on year, while Google Search & other grew 12%. That comparison shows faster expansion at Meta; it does not establish that Google’s search business is shrinking.

What the earnings comparison shows

The categories are not identical. Meta’s figure covers advertising across its family of apps, while Google Search & other is one component of Alphabet’s advertising business.

Including YouTube and its advertising network, Google reported total advertising revenue of $82.01 billion—still substantially above Meta’s advertising total.

Meta benefits from more impressions and higher ad prices

Meta reported a 10% annual increase in ad impressions and a 14% increase in average price per advertisement.

Those measures help explain the revenue expansion: the company delivered more advertisements while earning more per ad on average. Meta attributes part of its progress to AI-powered recommendations, engagement and advertising tools. That attribution is management’s assessment, rather than an independent measurement of AI’s contribution.

AI can affect several stages of an advertising campaign, from producing creative material to selecting audiences and evaluating results. However, stronger platform revenue does not mean every advertiser achieved a better return.

Google faces a changing search experience

Google is adapting its own search products through AI Overviews and AI Mode, while competing with standalone assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude.

The commercial question is how advertising works when users receive a generated response, carry out a conversation or complete more of a task within the service. CNBC’s reporting describes investor concerns about whether these changes could put pressure on search monetisation.

That is a different claim from saying users have stopped searching.

Alphabet said its year-on-year search-query growth rate was the highest in five years. Its release also reported continued growth in search revenue.

Searches, clicks and revenue must be measured separately

Three measures can move differently:

More queries do not automatically produce proportionately more outbound visits. Likewise, fewer visits to publishers would not, by itself, establish a decline in Google’s advertising income.

The quarterly earnings comparison does not provide a standalone measure of publisher referral traffic or prove how much business rival chatbots have taken from Google.

Cloud gives Alphabet another growth engine

Google Cloud revenue increased 103% to $30.71 billion. Alphabet attributed the growth to enterprise AI infrastructure, AI solutions and its wider cloud business.

The results show why the comparison extends beyond advertising: both companies are investing in AI, but their revenue sources and routes to monetisation differ.

For advertisers, the useful test remains campaign performance—conversion quality, acquisition cost and profitable sales. For publishers, the relevant evidence is referral traffic and reader behaviour. Neither can be inferred reliably from the headline revenue growth gap alone.