Truist still sees Search as Google’s ‘game to lose’

Truist keeps a Buy rating and $196 price target on Alphabet after hosing an expert call regarding gen-AI and its impact on Search. While gen-AI is transforming search engines into answer engines, upending a $220B industry and threatening Google’s hegemony by fueling the emergence of AI-native platforms like OpenAI and Perplexity, this is “still Google’s game to lose”, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Truist further notes that it sees much of gen-AI search volume as “incremental, not cannibalistic” and also believes that Google will continue to dominate monetizable core search in the near-to-medium term given its advertiser scale, brand and trove of proprietary transactional data.