Meta reported $60.80 billion in second-quarter revenue on July 29, up 28% year over year, as ad impressions rose 14% and average price per ad increased 12%. The company also said 9 million small businesses use at least one of its AI ad-creative tools, extending automation from ranking and targeting into campaign production and management.
Meta reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $60.80 billion on July 29, a 28% increase from a year earlier. Advertising supplied $59.36 billion of that total, while ad impressions across its family of apps rose 14% and average price per ad increased 12%.
The growth came with a sharp cost increase. Meta reported $42.03 billion in costs and expenses, up 55%, including $2.40 billion in legal charges and $1.18 billion in severance expenses. Net income fell 14% to $15.85 billion, and free cash flow declined to $784 million as capital spending accelerated.
AI is moving through the whole ad workflow
On the earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said Meta is using large language models to improve ad prediction and ranking by combining more context from organic and advertising activity. He also said 9 million small businesses now use at least one Meta AI ad-creative tool.
The company is rolling out end-to-end creative systems that connect campaign performance data to new ad variations. That shifts AI's role beyond choosing which ad to show: the same platform can increasingly help create, test, rank, and adjust the campaign.
Mumbrella connected the earnings update to Meta's Ads Model Context Protocol connector and quoted Louder strategy chief Andrew Hughes describing possible "disintermediation" of parts of the consumer journey. That is an outside analyst's interpretation, not a result established by Meta's financial report. Meta's disclosed numbers show growth in advertising volume and pricing; they do not isolate how much of that growth was caused by any one AI tool.
What data and advertising teams should watch
For practitioners, the important systems pattern is a tightening feedback loop. Campaign outcomes can inform creative generation, ranking models can select among more variants, and agent-facing controls can move more campaign operations inside Meta's environment. That may reduce manual work, but it also increases dependence on platform-reported attribution and platform-defined optimization goals. Advertisers should preserve independent measurement, document which decisions agents may execute, and compare incremental conversion lift against spend—not just accept automated recommendations.
The next useful evidence would be reproducible advertiser-level experiments showing lift by tool, segment, and budget. Until then, Meta's Q2 results demonstrate strong ad-business growth alongside aggressive AI deployment, not a causal estimate of AI's contribution.
Key Points #
- 1Meta's Q2 revenue rose 28% to $60.80 billion, with advertising revenue of $59.36 billion.
- 2Ad impressions increased 14% and average price per ad rose 12%, while costs and expenses climbed 55% to $42.03 billion.
- 3Meta says 9 million small businesses use its AI ad-creative tools, but the quarter's disclosures do not isolate AI's causal contribution to revenue.
Scoring Rationale #
Meta's results show material scale in AI-supported advertising and a broader shift toward automated campaign creation and control, although company disclosures do not quantify the causal revenue contribution of individual AI tools.
Sources #
Primary source and supporting public references used for this report.
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