Piper Sandler Reduces Alphabet Price Target to $395

Piper Sandler analyst Thomas Champion lowered the price target on Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) to $395 (from $445) while maintaining an Overweight rating.

“2Q26 results were largely in-line with our expectations, but Cloud materially outperformed, accelerating to 82% y/y.

Shares fell ~4% after hours as management raised the 2026 capex guide again and reiterated plans for a “significant increase” in 2027. PT to $395 (from $445) on higher sustained capex. Reiterate OW.

Revenues of $119.8B were in-line with PSC ($119.8B) but 2% ahead of consensus ($117.1B). Search +17% modestly missed our estimate, but the qualitative discussion sounds strong.

Retail and finance drove the largest contributions, with all major verticals growing.

Management now describes AI Overviews and AI Mode as one unified search experience, framing AI as an “expansionary moment” driving incremental query growth.

Conspicuously, management highlighted sending “billions of clicks” to websites weekly via AI features, pushing back on publisher traffic-loss concerns.

AI Max exited beta this quarter, with adopters seeing ~15% higher conversions.”

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