Alphabet IncGOOGDON'T BUYJul 23, 2025Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Jul 10, 2026. Market Open.
Fears that AI would eat its lunch. Harder for Anthropic to monetize a new tool than for GOOG to take AI and apply it to a business model that it already monetizes. Muscle memory of the populace gravitates to GOOG to find information. Probably thrives in the new AI world, until something more disruptive comes along.
AI monetization is happening, and AI Mode has been a game changer. Stronger cloud growth (revenue grew 63% YOY last quarter, tremendous), broader monetization across platforms. Search and advertising remain strong, lots of cashflow. Also a great ecosystem.
Good growth, but relatively decent valuation. Yield is 0.25%.
A year ago, consensus was that Search was going to die. Seems ridiculous now. Gemini is overtaking ChatGPT. Data centre business is growing faster than before. Still not that expensive. He hasn't sold any shares yet, but may take some off the table from the long-term holding and put toward one of the Mag 7 laggards.
Doesn't own it, because there's a forecast of a 25% drop in 2026 in single search engine queries. In contrasts, Meta has 90% margins in their single search engine queries. Even if GOOG does well in AI and cloud, those are not as profitable as the main search business. Decent earnings growth ahead, but their earnings are more at risk. Instead of Google, she uses chatGPT and other methods to search.