Google Hits 350 Mn Paid Subscriptions Across Services, Search Queries ‘All Time High’: Sundar Pichai

Google, on Wednesday, announced the quarterly financial results for Q1 2026. During the earnings call with investors and analysts, company CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company increased its consolidated revenue by 22 percent year-over-year (YoY) to clock $109.9 billion (roughly Rs. 10.48 lakh crore) in the first quarter of the ongoing year. The quarter was also notable because the Mountain View-based tech giant hit a new paid subscriptions record, and grew its cloud services and the Search product significantly.

Google Q1 2026 Earnings Result

In a financial document, the company revealed that the first quarter of 2026 was also the 11th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth for the tech giant. The growth was headlined by a 16 percent Google Services revenue growth, a 19 percent growth in Search, an 11 percent rise in YouTube ads, and a growth of 19 percent in Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices.

Pichai highlighted that a boost to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) led to the company's cloud services witnessing a 63 percent YoY increase, reaching $20 billion (roughly Rs. 1.91 lakh crore) in revenue. The overall uptick also increased the company's operating income by 30 percent, and operating margin by 2 percent to 36.1 percent.

The Google CEO also listed the major highlights from the quarter that ended on March 30. The tech giant witnessed its “strongest quarter ever” for consumer artificial intelligence (AI) plans, with Gemini adoption leading the numbers. Across all platforms and services, the company hit a new milestone of reaching 350 million paid subscriptions. Pichai said that the key drivers were YouTube and Google One.

Google Search also recorded a strong quarter, and Pichai claimed that search queries reached “an all time high” in Q1 2026. The CEO attributed the 19 revenue growth to the AI investments and full-stack approach, as the AI experiences drove usage and queries.

Coming to the tech giant's proprietary large language models, the CEO said the Gemini 3.1 series is gaining traction among users and enterprises. Lyria 3, the music-generation model released in February, has generated more than 150 million songs, while Imagen 2 generated one billion images in just half the time of Imagen 1. Finally, the recently released Gemma 4 open-source AI model has also racked up more than 50 million downloads.

YouTube's growth has also continued in the previous quarter. “In Q1, our YouTube Music and Premium offering saw its largest quarterly increase in the total number of non-trial subscribers, both globally and in the US, since YouTube Premium launched in June 2018,” said Pichai. He added that more than 200 million hours of YouTube content are now being watched on smart TVs across the US. Additionally, the streaming platform also reached a new milestone of more than 10 million channels publishing Shorts, the short, vertical-scrolling videos, each day.