Alphabet Is Rebuilding Search as a Transaction Engine

A search query that once returned links is now beginning to complete transactions, and Alphabet’s latest results show how quickly that shift is moving from experiment to operating model.

After the company reported earnings on Wednesday (April 29), CEO Sundar Pichai made clear that the company is building toward a version of Search where AI executes task.

“Bringing agentic flows, workflows to consumers in a way that it’s easy for them to do, including in the context of search—I see as a huge opportunity ahead,” he said.

That direction is already visible in the numbers. Alphabet reported revenue of $109.9 billion, up 22% year over year, extending a run of double-digit growth to eleven consecutive quarters. Search revenue rose 19%, while Google Cloud increased 63%, reflecting demand tied directly to AI workloads and enterprise adoption.

Checkout Moves Into Search

The strategic shift is clearest in how Alphabet is rebuilding the shopping journey. Within AI Mode and the Gemini app, users can now move from product discovery to purchase without leaving the interface.

Executives on the analyst call Wednesday described this as a redesign of commerce infrastructure. The Universal Commerce Protocol is being used to connect merchants, platforms and payment flows, enabling AI systems to manage the sequence from recommendation through checkout.

AI-driven Search queries are at an all-time high, and more than 30% of search ad spend now uses AI-enabled campaign tools, reflecting how advertisers are adjusting to conversational and context-rich queries.

Philipp Schindler, Alphabet’s chief business officer, pointed to the way AI is changing both consumer behavior and monetization inside Search, as query volume rises and prompts become more conversational and complex. As he told analysts on the call, “AI is boosting our ability to deeply understand user intent for a given search query and to find the most relevant ad. Even when we don’t have a direct user query, we’re making significant strides in improving relevance.”

At the same time, social commerce is gaining weight through YouTube. The platform now sees more than 200 million hours of daily viewing on connected TVs in the U.S., and over 10 million channels publish Shorts each day, creating a large surface for AI-driven product discovery tied to creator content.

AI Demand Is Showing Up in the Numbers

The financial results point to where that activity is translating into revenue. Google Services generated $89.6 billion, up 16%, with subscriptions and Search leading the gains. Cloud crossed $20 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, driven by enterprise demand for AI infrastructure and models.

Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi detailed the scale of that demand, noting that operating income rose 30% to $39.7 billion.

The growth is being supported by significant investment. Capital expenditures reached $35.7 billion in the quarter, with the majority directed toward servers and data centers to support AI workloads.

That spending reflects both opportunity and constraint. Executives acknowledged that demand for AI compute is outpacing supply in certain areas, particularly in cloud services, where capacity limitations held back potential revenue.

Shares were up about 6% in after hours trading.

Balancing Growth With Capacity

Alphabet’s response has been to accelerate investment while refining how resources are allocated. The company is expanding its use of proprietary chips, scaling data center capacity and, in some cases, supplying hardware directly to customers.

The underlying strategy is to control the full AI stack, from infrastructure to applications, and to use that position to shape how commerce evolves. That includes reworking advertising formats to fit within AI-driven interactions and exploring how subscriptions and transaction-based models might complement traditional ad revenue.

Pichai emphasized that the transition is still nascent, even as adoption accelerates. “We are in very, very early innings of all that,” he said, referring to the broader move toward agentic systems and AI-driven workflows.