Hajra Naz
Alphabet sidestepped questions about Google’s reported AI partnership with Apple during its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, declining to address an investor inquiry about how the company views AI collaborations, including its role in powering Siri.
The silence was notable. By ignoring the question entirely, Alphabet signaled that it isn’t ready to discuss how the Apple partnership could affect its core business, a business that is now increasingly centered on artificial intelligence.
Google and Apple have long benefited from working together. For years, Google has paid Apple to remain the default search engine on iPhones, a deal that generated an estimated $20 billion annually, according to disclosures from the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit. In exchange, Google gained access to Apple’s enormous user base. Apple said last quarter that it now has 2.5 billion active devices worldwide.
The rumored AI agreement with Apple is believed to cost roughly $1 billion per year. But unlike search, the financial upside for Google is far less obvious. Traditional Google Search monetizes traffic through ads placed at the top of results. AI-powered search, which Google has framed as the future of its core product, does not yet have a clear ad model.
Last May, Google said it would begin testing ads in AI Mode, its chatbot-style search interface. So far, those ads appear below responses or embedded within them, and remain firmly in the experimental phase. Google is also exploring agentic shopping features, including Shop with AI Mode, designed to guide users from product discovery to checkout directly inside the AI interface.
At the same time, the broader AI industry is still debating whether advertising-supported AI models will work at all. Anthropic, a major Google competitor, is challenging that approach with a forthcoming Super Bowl ad, taking aim at the ad-driven strategies used by OpenAI and Google.
For now, how AI partnerships like the one with Apple will translate into sustainable revenue remains unclear—and Alphabet appears in no rush to explain.
The Siri deal itself received only a brief mention during the earnings call. CEO Sundar Pichai said he was pleased that Google had become Apple’s “preferred cloud provider” and would help develop the “next generation of Apple foundation models” based on Gemini technology. Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler echoed the same wording when referencing the partnership.
