Is PPC Dying? Google's Q3 Numbers and the Phone in 2027

Your two main lead generation channels are getting worse.

• Buyers ask an AI instead of Google, so your search ad never shows.
• Their LinkedIn and email inbox is full of AI-written slop, so yours gets deleted.

Good news, a phone call with someone who picks up still works.

I said a version of that to two marketing buyers this week. One spends about £15,000 a month on Google Ads for a mid-market firm. The other looks after six SaaS clients and is being asked by every one of them whether the paid search line in the 2027 budget should stay. The press has spent the autumn writing PPC's obituary. Then, on 28 October, Google published its own numbers, and they said something more useful than an obituary.

Here is what the numbers say, with every study and filing linked so you can check them yourself, and what it means for anyone whose pipeline depends on being found.

The short answer. PPC is alive. The click is what is dying, and Google has now said so in its own accounts. Search queries grew at their fastest rate in five years. Search revenue was flat on the quarter. Paid clicks slowed, the price per click went up, and the company's chief business officer told investors that AI Mode queries make less money. Outside Google, Pew Research found users click a search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appears, against 15% without one, and Seer Interactive has paid click-through on those queries down 68% in fifteen months. So the paid click is becoming the last click on a shrinking page, priced by an auction that keeps rising. Meanwhile Gartner found 69% of B2B buyers take what the AI told them to a sales rep to validate it. The buyer does the research with a machine and makes the decision with a human. That is what Sentrama, the B2B lead generation channel I co-founded, sells: a prospect in your ICP (ideal customer profile) who picks up the phone to hear your pitch.

That is why a human on the phone matters more in 2027, and that is the infrastructure problem this piece is about: getting in front of a buyer at all.

What did Google's Q3 2026 numbers say about paid search?

Google's third-quarter 2026 numbers said four things about paid search, and they only make sense read together. Every figure is from Alphabet's own filings or the call that followed them.

• More searches than ever. Alphabet's third-quarter release on 28 October 2026 reported revenue of $127.6 billion, up 25%, and Sundar Pichai said the year-on-year query growth rate was "the highest it's been in the last five years", commercial queries included.
• Flat search revenue. Google Search & other came in at $63.35 billion, up 12% on a year earlier according to the 10-Q, but up just $79 million on the quarter before, 0.1%, as PPC Land worked out. Growth has slowed every quarter this year: 19% in the first, 17% in the second, 12% in the third. CNBC had analysts expecting $64.96 billion.
• Fewer clicks, dearer clicks. The filing shows paid clicks up 8% in the quarter against 11% for the year to date, with cost per click up 4%, per PPC Land's read of the 10-Q. The release itself left both figures out.
• Google's own explanation. On the earnings call, chief business officer Philipp Schindler named currency as "the single largest driver of Search deceleration relative to Q2", then added that "the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode". The AI answer makes less money than the ten blue links did. Google said it.

Two terms, since both will keep coming up. AI Mode is Google's conversational search tab, where a model writes the answer and the links sit behind it. AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries that now appear above the results on ordinary searches. Both answer the question before anyone clicks.

The market read it the same way. Shares fell more than 10% on the day, CNBC reported, and The Register and Barchart both put the loss at roughly $500 billion of market value, Alphabet's worst day on record. That is a move in investors' valuation rather than cash leaving Google, and the company is still growing. But a business whose revenue is flat while its usage hits a five-year high has told you where the clicks went.

Watch what Google did about it the same day. It expanded ads inside AI Mode to ten more countries, with the UK in the fourth quarter, and started showing ads on follow-up questions in the US. The auction is moving inside the answer. Your bid will follow it there.

What has the AI press actually said about PPC in 2026?

Strip out the headlines and the independent evidence on PPC in 2026 runs the same way as Google's filing: more searches, fewer clicks, dearer clicks. Every figure below is linked to the study it came from.

• Gartner predicted in February 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as buyers moved to AI chatbots and virtual agents. The forecast was mocked at the time. Google's own query growth says the searches moved rather than vanished; the clicks are what went.
• Pew Research tracked 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% when it did not. They clicked a link inside the summary itself in 1% of visits. And 26% of those visits ended the browsing session there, against 16% without a summary. Google disputed the method. It has not published a number of its own.
• The ISB and Carnegie Mellon experiment, published in April 2026, is the one causal study. Organic clicks fell 38% where an AI Overview appeared. Sponsored clicks and search frequency held. Removing the AI Overview nearly doubled the clicks going out to websites.
• Seer Interactive has tracked click-through on its clients' queries since June 2024. Where an AI Overview appears, organic click-through fell from 1.76% to 0.61% by September 2025, a 61% drop. Paid click-through on the same queries fell from 19.70% to 6.34%, a 68% drop. Brands cited inside the AI Overview kept more of both.
• Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords in February 2026 and found the top organic result gets 58% fewer clicks when an AI Overview sits above it.
• Bain surveyed 1,117 consumers and found about 80% rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches, and about 60% of searches now end without anyone leaving the results page.
• Indexed looked at 50 B2B keywords and found 42 of them, 84%, trigger an AI Overview. The click estimates in that study are modelled rather than measured, so take the share of queries from it and the click rates from the studies above.
• First Page Sage's 2026 report puts B2B SaaS organic sessions down about 30%, with 82% of queries now returning an AI Overview and AI platforms sending 12.1% of B2B SaaS sessions.
• The auction has not fallen to compensate. WordStream's 2026 benchmark, across more than 13,000 search campaigns in 23 industries, puts the average cost per click at $5.42, still climbing, which matches the 4% rise in Google's own filing.
• The new entrant is another auction. ChatGPT started showing ads in February 2026 and reached 89 countries and more than 100,000 advertisers by October. The only independent study so far, a working paper by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze covering 1,898 online shops over 60 weeks and reported by PPC Land, found a paid ChatGPT visit earned $0.89 against $2.45 for a paid Google search visit.

Is PPC dying, or just getting more expensive?

PPC, pay-per-click search advertising where you pay only when someone clicks the ad, is getting more expensive and each click is worth less, which is a different thing from dying. Google's quarter is the whole argument in four lines: searches up, revenue flat, clicks slowing, price per click up 4%. The free click is going. The buyer reads the answer on the results page, or never reaches the results page because they asked an AI. What is left to click is the ad, and the ad is priced by an auction in which every competitor who lost their organic traffic is now bidding for the same slot. The press is half right. Paid search is alive. What has died is the idea that a click gets you a B2B buyer.

Look at what the click buys. A form fill, at about £105 on GrowthSpree's 2026 B2B medians for Google Search, and about £165 on LinkedIn Ads, converted at $1 to £0.75 and labelled as estimates. Somebody still has to call it. The first buyer this week put the frustration well: the platform keeps finding reasons for you to spend more, and it is hard to see whether the extra spend was ever the right call. The dashboard counts clicks and form fills. It cannot count conversations, because it never had one.

The same thing has happened to the inbox, and there the numbers are worse. Backlinko analysed 12 million outreach emails in 2019 and found an 8.5% reply rate. Instantly's 2026 benchmark, built on a full year of 2025 sending, puts the platform average at 3.43%. Belkins counted replies against every one of the 7.5 million emails it sent in 2025 and got 0.45%. Three ways of counting, one direction. Google and Microsoft now send unauthenticated bulk mail to junk or reject it outright. Spray and pray, in the inbox or on the phone, stopped being a method in 2025. It is now a way of paying to be ignored.

Where has the B2B buyer gone?

The B2B buyer has gone to the machine for research, and to a human for the decision. Gartner's May 2026 survey of 645 B2B buyers found 67% prefer a rep-free experience for the research phase, and 69% prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep before they act on them. TrustRadius surveyed 1,862 technology buyers in January 2026: 63% used AI while buying, and 94% of those check what it tells them. Demos, trials, prior experience and reviews still decide the deal. Forrester's 2027 predictions, published in October, say AI agents will influence 75% of B2B purchase decisions and that buyers will double their human interactions to check what the AI recommends. The same report predicts marketing leaders will cut up to a quarter of their roles chasing AI productivity gains that fail to arrive.

Read those together with Google's quarter. The buyer's questions are being asked in record numbers, and answered by a model from the pages the model has read. The buyer's decision is being made in a conversation with a person. If you are only in the first half, you are being summarised. If you are in the second half, you are being chosen.

Why does a human on the phone matter more in 2027?

A human on the phone matters more in 2027 because it is the scarce thing. Ads buy impressions. Agents write text. Every inbox is filling with email a machine wrote, and the reply rate is falling with it. What nobody's software can manufacture is a human conversation with a buyer who picked up the phone. People buy from people, and on a higher-ticket B2B purchase they are saying so out loud.

There is a second reason, and it is the one most marketing plans miss. A huge amount of what you need to know only surfaces in a conversation. The real pain. The provider they already use and when the contract renews. The budget cycle. The objection in their own words. No click tells you any of that, and no form field asks. A human who is listening gets it in thirty seconds. That is the insight that makes the next campaign better, and it is why we call every one of ours a Sentrama Insight.

So the question for 2027 is how you get a human on the phone with your ICP at a cost you can put in the plan. AI has made that easier, in the one place it belongs. Our AI finds your next customer: who is in your ICP, who has a direct number, who picks up and at what hour. Of the numbers worth dialling, about 19% pick up in the UK and about 8% in the USA. Then a human talks to them. A Sentrama SDR (sales development representative), employed by us, trained on your pitch, never an AI voice. AI does the tasks. Humans do the talking.

Which problem is this: infrastructure or pitch?

This is an infrastructure problem. Every B2B pipeline problem is one of two. The infrastructure problem is getting your ICP into a conversation: the right person, a direct number, a call at the hour they answer, and a price for it you can forecast. The pitch problem is what happens in the 30 to 40 seconds after they pick up. Google's quarter describes an infrastructure problem: the channel that used to put you in front of a buyer is putting you in front of fewer of them, at a higher price, with no conversation at the end. Fix that first. The pitch only exists once somebody answers, and it stays yours.

What should a marketing leader do before the 2027 budget is signed?

Before the 2027 budget is signed, a marketing leader should count conversations rather than clicks. Take every channel in the plan and ask how many real conversations with your ICP it produced last month. Search will give you form fills. Email will give you opens. Only one line will give you a number of humans who spoke to a human.

Then ask each channel for a price fixed before you spend. In 2002 Google stopped charging for impressions and charged for clicks (Search Engine Land has the record), because its engine predicted who would click better than anyone else's. Advertisers stopped buying exposure and started buying results. Twenty-four years on, Google's own filing shows the click running out of road, and its answer is to sell you the same click inside the AI answer. Sentrama charges further down the funnel, for the conversation, at £60 a lead fixed at any volume, because five million dials taught our platform who picks up and when. Google created pay-per-click. We are creating pay-per-conversation. Ads bill for clicks. You pay us for the conversation, not the tasks.

None of this means switching off search. Keep the capture channel for the buyers who still type the query. Put a forecastable number of conversations beside it, with its own cost per lead and its own attribution, so that when the AI draws up the shortlist, you are already a name they have spoken to.

A fixed cost per lead, no auction, and a human on the end of every one: see how Sentrama works for marketing leaders.

Onwards and upwards.