Citizens Keeps Market Outperform on Alphabet, $515 Price Target

Citizens analyst Andrew Boone reiterated a Market Outperform rating and $515 price target on Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL).

“Google is leaning into being a harness by offering flexible model choice, including 3P models.

Specifically, Google is providing flexibility in model choice, starting with Anthropic’s Claude and adding others over time.

By orchestrating each task across a variety of models, including third-party models, Google is helping organizations control costs, while Google’s agent has access to best-in-class intelligence.

Cost controls are an increasingly important enterprise feature, with Google now offering cost guardrails down to the project level, which provides enterprises better insight into model usage across organizations.

From a strategic point of view, by being the orchestration layer, Google is no longer competing on frontier intelligence, but on integrations, UX, and enterprise tools, which we view as stickier and less competitive.

Google joins OpenAI and SpaceXAI in moving its AI to more open platforms that offer distribution to partners.

Interestingly, we note Gemini is not available in Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Office, though we acknowledge most office-oriented tasks at this point can be fulfilled via open-source models.”

This research note is reproduced verbatim from the issuing firm. Price Target never edits, paraphrases or alters analysts’ words — we only republish them in one place.