Artificial Intelligence

Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings: 14% ad revenue growth, 500k advertisers on AI Max

By Eric Benjamin Seufert

Alphabet released its Q2 2026 earnings last night: Alphabet beat analysts' expectations on revenue in the quarter. Once adjusted for earnings from the company's investments in Anthropic, which raised capital at a higher valuation in May, and SpaceX, which went public last month, Alphabet's EPS in the quarter was slightly behind expectations. As with Q1, the headline […]

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Comments:

bo*****an@******.com Jul 23, 2026 6:39 pm

Thank you for your rebuttal of Max Anderson’s X post. Other tech guys (not ad experts like you) replied to his original post, making somewhat overlapping claims less about the concepts you rebutted but about Alphabet ads for them now having a worse cost-benefit than they did years ago. Are these advertisers doing something wrong, is this just the price of ads better converging on their value, or is there another effect that explains their experience?

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Eric Jul 24, 2026 7:45 am

There are a few effects at play:

  1. little incentive for people who are seeing great results with Google Search to chime in
  2. product improvements aren't universally beneficial for all advertisers. Some advertisers will be crowded out of auctions as targeting improves.
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