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I know for most people that the big surprise here is sustained search ad revenue in the face of AI. But I’m super curious on margins because I thought for sure offering so much free AI inference would be so insanely expensive it harmed margins.

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No one is losing money on inference these days. Google's vertical integration means that they have some of the lowest inference costs in the industry in any event.

Microsoft recently announced changes to copilot because, apparently, it was losing money on inference.

They were loosing money giving absurdly generous agentic usage on expensive models to people with $10 to $40 flat rate subscriptions.

They weren't selling inference.

They were charging a flat rate per query no matter how many tokens it consumed. People naturally got very good at writing prompts that used as many tokens as possible.

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