// 9TO5GOOGLE — MOBILE & WEB
Google had a very good, very bad Q3
Good morning! Today I’m reading about the death of the internet, deciding whether to buy a PROLED or many pro LEDs, building all my IKEA furniture with this step-by-step 3D app, trying desperately to get into the Readwise Books early access, and playing an “Enhanced 3D” Command & Conquer: Red Alert on my PC.
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Inbox is written by Daniel Bader. Read previous issues here, and then catch up with Ben Schoon’s excellent Weekender column published every Sunday.
Alphabet’s Q3 earnings were interesting. Despite a 25% rise in revenue and a healthy net income of $26 billion, analysts were disappointed with the company’s results, sending the stock down as much as 11% in after-hours trading.
On the plus side, the company’s cloud business is booming, doubling year-over-year revenue to $30 billion as it attracts frontier labs to its data centers. But advertising revenue didn’t meet expectations, and investors appear to be worried that its search advertising business, one of the most efficient sources of recurring revenue in history, is not keeping up with changing user behavior.
As Anthropic gets ready to soar into its IPO later this year, mature businesses like Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon are racing to adapt to a market where demand for AI infrastructure is outpacing compute supply. But investors are looking at the capital expenditure tied up in future data center buildouts and getting nervous that, if the bubble bursts, even these well-capitalized companies will take massive hits.
The biggest question surrounding Google’s stock performance is whether it can sufficiently monetize AI-powered search before demand for its traditional search inventory falls off a cliff. As the company sends less and less traffic to the open web, it’s touting the fact that AI Mode and AI Overviews keep people on Google for three times as long as traditional search.
So it’s no surprise that it’s expanding ads in AI Mode to 10 new markets this week, with more to come by the end of the year. While the post was only a few paragraphs long, expanding its AI ad business may end up being one of the company’s most consequential announcements of 2026.
I didn’t get to see either of the first Dune movies on IMAX, but you can bet your ass I’ve already secured opening-day tickets for the third one. Dune: Part Three debuts in December, and we now have the final trailer that showcases the impending showdown between Muad’Dib and Chani as the former realizes the consequences of his galactic war.
On the gadgety side, there’s another impending showdown brewing between XREAL’s Android XR-powered Aura glasses and Meta’s upcoming VR Glasses.