Everyone is catching up to Google, but they're doing better, according to parent company Alphabet's third-quarter earnings report released on Tuesday. While Google has been battling stiff competition on all fronts and investing heavily in infusing artificial intelligence into as many of its products as possible, its advertising business, the company's cash cow, continues to thrive. Search business revenue was US$44 billion, a year-on-year increase of 11%.

The biggest question coming up is how Google's focus on artificial intelligence will affect this core business. Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience is still only available on an opt-in basis, so we don't yet know how much of an impact it will have on the company's ad business.

Google has already started working on solving this problem. During Google's earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company would experiment with new formats that match the way SGE works -- and the company has already shown off some ideas -- so perhaps we'll start to see some of these debut in the coming weeks or months. Chief commercial officer Philipp Schindler added later in the call: "It is extremely important to us that in this new experience, advertisers still have the opportunity to reach potential customers during their search journey."

As the company rolls out SGE, "we want to make sure the product works well, creates value for our ecosystem, and that advertising transitions well," Pichai said.

Injecting artificial intelligence into search is a long-term plan for Google. Pichai said he sees an opportunity to "grow search and assistant over the next decade." Last quarter, he declared that over time, SGE would become "just the way search works," and given comments about advertising on Tuesday's conference call, the company appears to be getting serious about how to turn AI-driven search into more of a business.

Google's other businesses are also doing well. YouTube advertising revenue reached $7.9 billion, an increase of more than 12% over last year. The company is adding a host of AI tools to its popular video service, including a "dream screen" feature that lets creators place AI-generated photos and videos in the background of short clips. Google's cloud business, which provides artificial intelligence services that customers can purchase for their own applications and products, brought in $8.4 billion in revenue, up 22% from revenue in the third quarter of 2022.

One thing Google didn't mention on the call was who would replace Ruth Porat as chief financial officer. Alphabet announced in its second-quarter earnings report that Porat will be promoted to president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, responsible for overseeing Alphabet's "other bets" investments. At the time, Alphabet did not announce a successor, and it does so now.

However, Porat did hint during Tuesday's conference call that there may be some changes to OtherBets. "Within the OtherBets portfolio, we have also been working hard to identify opportunities to be more focused and operate more efficiently," Porat said. I think this hints that Alphabet will make some kind of reduction in its investment in OtherBets in the future, but we'll have to wait and see what exactly the company decides.

In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Google has also cast a shadow over Google.