Watching other people use Google, the predominant method of searching for information involves a query followed by getting their answer from the AI summary that appears above any search results.

I'm not sure what impact this would be having on Adwords, but another commenter mentions that Google isn't hurting in the ad revenue department.

While TFA is anecdote, the author mentions maintaining their spend, being gifted adword budget, and getting lower returns so increasing spend.

This suggests adword revenue is up, conversion to adword 'dollar' balances is inflating those balances, so both return per dollar in is down and even more down is return per adword balance dollar.

It's a leading indicator that quarterly-return focused Google must be scrambling to fix right now - they inflated themselves out of Q4 2025 but 2026 is a question mark, or to parle some Boxton Matrix, is the cash cow dying and if so is the extension strategy ad injection in AI responses, product placement in your AI videos, background changes in your family snaps, etc.