*By Waleed Qamar | SEO By Highsoftware99*
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Sundar Pichai announced the 2.5 billion number on a Monday. By Friday of the same week, Google filed its appeal with the D.C. Circuit, arguing that Judge Mehta made one of the most basic errors in antitrust law a court can make. The 2.5 billion is AI Overviews monthly active users. AI Mode, launched one year earlier, crossed one billion in the same announcement. The appeal argues Google earned its dominance through hard work and innovation. The numbers say the platform a federal court found to have been protected illegally is now the fastest-scaling AI product in search history.
That is not a philosophical contradiction. It is a practical one, playing out in organic search data that practitioners watch every week.
The legal record: Judge Mehta found in August 2024 that Google violated the Sherman Act, specifically by paying billions annually to Apple and others to remain the default search engine on devices and browsers. The September 2025 remedies ruling imposed limits on those exclusivity deals, declined to force a Chrome sale, and left most of the distribution infrastructure intact. Google is appealing the original finding. The DOJ is cross-appealing upward, arguing the remedies were too lenient. Google has also moved to pause implementing even those modest constraints while the appeal runs. The case will likely reach D.C. Circuit oral arguments in late 2026 or 2027.
Image credit: Screenshot from "SEO in 2026: How I'd Rank in Google in the AI Era" by Ahrefs on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiW6xRYSXmM).
In the same period: AI Overviews now triggers on approximately 48% of tracked queries, up 58% year over year. AI Mode queries are more than doubling every quarter. The average AI Overview occupies roughly 1,200 pixels on a desktop screen. The standard desktop viewport is 900. Before a user sees the first organic listing, they have already scrolled past an AI-generated answer taller than their entire screen. That is not a layout quirk. That is the product.
The thing I notice now when I open Search Console for clients is that impressions are up broadly. Google is showing more results to more people. The clicks are not following. Total search impressions increased roughly 49% in the year after AI Overviews launched, and click-throughs fell nearly 30% over the same period. I have started showing clients two separate trend lines, impressions and clicks, because the gap between them is now the most important number to explain. They are supposed to move together. They no longer do.
Google's appeal argues it built a superior search engine through "hard work, bold innovation and shrewd business decisions." This is true in isolation. Google built a genuinely better product. What the appeal does not address is whether a billion-user AI Mode rollout in twelve months would have been achievable on any platform that did not begin with four billion people already locked in through arrangements a court found to be illegal.
The assumption I heard from clients throughout 2024 and 2025 was that a major antitrust finding against Google's search monopoly would eventually create some opening: changed defaults, real competition, better conditions for organic clicks. What the eighteen months since that ruling actually produced was modest remedies, a pause on those remedies pending appeal, a cross-appeal arguing they were too lenient, and an AI product deployment that cut position-one click-through rates nearly in half while the courts were still figuring out what to do about the underlying monopoly.
I expected the remedies to create some friction on the expansion. They did not. The rollout continued at the same pace regardless. One client in an education-adjacent category watched AI Overview coverage on their target queries go from 18% to 83% in twelve months. Their rankings held. Their traffic dropped 40%. Nothing about their site had changed.
Clients ask me whether the antitrust outcome will eventually give them their traffic back. The appellate timeline and the AI deployment timeline are not synchronized. By the time any meaningful remedy touches what AI Overviews does to organic clicks, the product will look nothing like what the original 2024 case described.
Alphabet posted $77 billion in advertising revenue in Q1 2026 alone. The court found the monopoly was real. The monopoly did not notice.
Waleed Qamar holds a BSc in Computer Science from Purdue University and has spent the years since turning that technical foundation into something the curriculum never covered: figuring out why websites rank, why they fall, and why most businesses never find out until it is too late.
Pakistan-born and based between the United States and South Asia, he has managed search visibility for e-commerce stores, local service businesses, and SaaS startups across two continents. He started in SEO when guest posting still worked, survived the Penguin update, and has rebuilt client sites from scratch after algorithm hits more than once.
He has watched good businesses get sold packages that looked like progress and delivered nothing lasting. He has also seen the right approach quietly double a site’s traffic without a single press release about it.
His writing on SEO By Highsoftware99 covers Google algorithm updates, autocomplete optimization, semantic SEO structure, and the widening gap between what agencies promise and what Google actually rewards in 2026.
He knows what a traffic cliff looks like in Search Console on the morning you discover it.
