Google's AI Overviews reach over 2 billion monthly users

Ammon

2 days ago

Ammon News - Google is all-in on AI, and based on the company's latest quarterly earnings, AI has been good for its bottom line. In a press release for Alphabet's Q2 2025 earnings, CEO Sundar Pichai said that 'AI is positively impacting every part of the business' and that features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are 'performing well.'
The company is also planning to increase its planned capital expenditures for the year up to $85 billion, according to Pichai. That's an increase of $10 billion, and could be a sign that Alphabet wants to keep pace with massive data center buildouts from companies like OpenAI and Meta. 'Our updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers, and an acceleration in the pace of datacenter construction, primarily to meet cloud customer demand,' CFO Anat Ashkenazi said during Alphabet's Q2 earnings call.
For the quarter, Alphabet reported revenue of $96.4 billion, up 14 percent year over year, with revenues for its 'Google Search' segment reaching $54.1 billion.
Pichai's comments in the press release on AI align with recent findings from Pew, which suggested that AI Overviews appear to be successful at getting people answers but at the expense of clicks through to the websites that would otherwise offer them.
AI Mode also has more than 100 million monthly active users in the US and India, while AI Overviews has more than 2 billion monthly users across 'more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages,' Pichai said during the call. 'We are also seeing that our AI features cause users to search more as they learn that Search can meet more of their needs,' which is 'especially true for younger users.' Pichai also said that the Gemini app now has 450 million monthly active users, 'with daily requests growing over 50 percent from Q1.'
During the second quarter, Google hosted its annual I/O developer conference, which was jam-packed with AI-focused announcements like the rollout of AI Mode for Search (which news publishers have called 'theft'), upgrades to its video and image generation models, Gemini AI in Chrome, and much more powerful smart replies in Gmail. (Based on that event, Google's future is Google googling.) And just ahead of I/O, Google hosted an Android-focused show where it revealed the youthful new design language for Android 16.
At the same time, Google is anticipating the ruling from the remedy phase of the Department of Justice's lawsuit, which took place during the second quarter as well. Last August, a judge ruled that Google 'is a monopolist' in that antitrust case, and remedies could include Google getting broken up. (A lot of companies have expressed interest in buying Chrome.)
The company also changed its 'G' logo for the first time in nearly a decade. The Verge