I have experienced an isnane uptick in costs due to what seems to be the GoogleSearch Grounding.
Picture of my Google Cloud Console stats attached - Blue bar - since april 8th.
My app has not changed - users have not changed significantly (+30% since same period last month) - We have GoogleSearch grounding included in one tool that made a total of 50 google search requests on each day - visible through the logs in the AI studio.
It seems like Gemini-3-flash-preview which causes the costs apparently mistakes every single function call for my tools as search queries. This is a breaking issue - I am forced to downgrade to gemini-2.5-flash in the meantime until this will be fixed or otherwise swap models over to Qwen-3.6-flash…
I am going to start a billing dispute to see if that has any chance of going through. This is clearly a bug - not on my side as the service has been unchanged since March 17th.
