Meta set to Overtake Google in Ad Revenue for the First Time
Advertising research firm Emarketer has forecasted that Meta will overtake Google in global net ad revenue for 2026.
The company’s ad spending forecast reveals that Meta is projected to reach US$243.46bn in net worldwide ad revenues, while Google will reach US$239.45bn.
This is an increase of nearly US$50bn from 2025 for Meta, with the company reaching US$196.17bn for the year, compared to Google’s US$215.06bn.
Meta’s usurping of Google comes as the company sees “unprecedented” growth for a company of its size, says Emarketer, with the company’s worldwide growth rate predicted to be 24.1% in 2026, compared to 22.1% in 2025.
Max Willens, Principle Analyst at Emarketer, says: “In surpassing Google, Meta has essentially had many of its core strategies validated.
“Meta has long understood that scale, network effects and habits are more important than anything else in digital media. It has carefully built and defended the advantages it has in all three areas.”
Meta’s advertising growth
In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that ads will be “by far, the most important driver of growth in our business,” over the next couple years – with the company’s ad revenue increasing 24% year-over-year to US$58.1bn in the fourth quarter of 2025.
This growth follows the introduction of new ad formats on WhatsApp, increasing monetisation on Instagram Reels – with Reels now accounting for more than half of time spent on the app – and updates to the company’s Partnership Ads Hub, to better help brands target and convert organic content into paid partnership ads.
Meta has also been implementing AI more significantly in its advertising business, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that the company is aiming to make it possible for brands to fully create and target ads using AI by the end of 2026.
These efforts are largely focused through Meta Advantage+, which can automate e-commerce campaigns, enhance ad creative and automatically distribute budgets to the best-performing ad sets.
The company has also developed Andromeda, an AI ad retrieval system – which works by analysing ads in real-time to match them with user’s specific interests, looking at historic engagement to predict which ads will perform best.
Changing user behaviour
Google may be struggling to keep momentum with Meta in terms of ad growth due to shifts in user behaviour.
With more passive behaviours coming into play from an algorithmically-driven social-media model, Meta is able to capture user attention for longer – with Gen Z Instagram users spending an average of 53 minutes per day on the app.
The company’s ad growth is also more limited due to YouTube Premium, says Emarketer, which prevents a significant portion of users from being advertised to on the platform.
“Google has plenty of levers it can pull to try to speed up growth,” says Max. “But the diversity of its business – it generates billions of dollars in subscriber revenues from YouTube Premium, for example – may make it harder for it to leapfrog past Meta in terms of digital ad revenues.”
