AI search may kill the click. But users still need to trust the answers

It’s hard to think of Google as a comeback story, because it never went away, but in the world of AI , it’s a fitting narrative. The company was broadly mocked for its early moves in the generative era, which were mostly stumbles . Upstarts like Perplexity and ChatGPT were nipping at its market share with arguably more innovative experiences. It had to navigate choppy antitrust waters. Today, Google is in a much stronger position. Not because it’s just coming off its I/O developer conference , or because it has the best model or because it commands a major AI ecosystem. Those titles get passed around the big labs every few months. The reason is much simpler: the business is holding up. Subscribe to The Media Copilot Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com SIGN UP AI hasn’t broken Google Alphabet’s first-quarter earnings showed Google Services revenue up 16% to $89.6 billion and Google Search and “Other” revenue is up 19%. Clearly, the rising presence of AI in the information ecosystem hasn’t hurt Google’s business; if anything, it’s the opposite. That success appears to have led to more confidence. Google announced many new AI products at I/O, but one of the most notable ones to the media industry was a set of new ad formats . Conversational Discovery ads are built on the fly to fit naturally into the answer to the person’s query, appearing as a “sponsored” section. Highlighted Ads and AI-powered Shopping Ads are similar, inserting ads into more general product category-specific queries. And then there are Business Agents for Leads—tailored versions of Gemini that appear within the ad. These formats are still being tested, but the direction is clear: Google is getting more sophisticated about how it monetizes AI experiences. The company stated a few months back that it had no plans to sell ads in Gemini, which executives mentioned in response to