Bernstein Lowers Alphabet Price Target to $325

Bernstein SocGen Group analyst Mark Shmulik lowered the price target on Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) to $325 (from $385) while maintaining a Market Perform rating.

“Alphabet reported its 3Q26 results today after the market close. -10% is a big move.

Perhaps we’ve all gotten a bit too used to high torque moves in this tape: see Meta’s rise and fall over the past few weeks.

But still, a +/- double-digit move for a not-so-magnificent 7 company on an earnings print is meaningful.

The short answer is Search missed noticeably decelerating sequentially, Y/Y and on a 2-year stack. And Search is still why folks own Google.

The explanations all make sense: FX headwinds, APAC advertisers hit with EU tariff changes, pull forward of Prime Day and the umbrella of associated ad spend into 2Q, and curiously commentary on AI mode both being a tailwind to total search query volume – highest search growth rate in 5 years – but also a headwind to search revenues.But if you’re explaining… you’re not story-telling.

And in a market short on patience, Google’s stock has now given back all the good vibe gains achieved when Search growth was accelerating, Cloud going from strength to strength, and it was “easy” to slap the AI winner tag on Google.

We still think Google is an AI winner, but it’s not easy right now.

If there’s one thing the market has taught us, numbers need to be clean, and then you can tell a wonderful tale about being an AI winner, and we rinse and repeat this cycle with a new AI champion once a quarter.

For now, Google is on the opposite end of this spectrum, but it’s not hard to see them back on top early next year as capacity comes online, ads on AI surfaces ramp, agentic products launch and scale, all leading into their annual I/O developer conference.”

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