WHEN HYPE BLINDS, LOOK FOR THE QUIET EXECUTIONER

(GOOG)

Imagine sitting at a poker table where everyone folds to the guy in sunglasses. They’re convinced he’s bluffing. 

Meanwhile, you’re holding pocket aces and watching a pot you should be taking grow smaller by the second. That’s where we are with Alphabet (GOOG). 

Everyone’s obsessing over the AI threat. Few are noticing the opportunity quietly forming under the table.

There’s a panic underway. AI is supposedly here to vaporize Google’s business. 

Investors are acting like search is an endangered species. Market share numbers are recited like funeral rites. Gen Z is sampling chatbots the way they used to experiment with flavored vodkas. On paper, it sounds ominous.

But let’s slow down.

Search revenue just grew 10% year over year. For a business supposedly in decline, that’s not bad. In fact, it’s a bit awkward for the disruption narrative. 

AI Overviews, once painted as a threat to monetization, now have 1.5 billion monthly users. Obviously, Google isn’t getting blindsided. If anything, they’re absorbing the wave. 

And unlike most of their rivals, they’re already monetizing AI Overviews with ads — a quiet but important signal that this transition isn’t just cosmetic. It’s commercial.

Then there’s Gemini 2.5 Pro. While the headlines are distracted, Google has built one of the most capable foundation models in existence. 

And based on multiple metrics, Gemini leads in performance across multiple categories. The real kicker is cost. It runs at $3.44 per million tokens. The competition is charging 10 times that. 

If you understand how AI will scale across enterprises, you’ll realize this is more than a technical flex. It’s a business model advantage.

And it gets better. While everyone’s still busy comparing chatbot quirks, Google is quietly pushing into agentic AI. These are models that don’t just respond. They act. Plan. Execute. 

This is the direction the industry is heading, and the addressable market is somewhere between $127 billion and $360 billion over the next decade. Google has the tools, the hardware, and now the developer infrastructure to lead it. 

You might’ve missed it, but Google’s generative video tech is also turning heads. Veo 3 is already outperforming Sora in several benchmarks, placing just behind ByteDance in AI video generation. 

And in a world increasingly shifting toward multimodal interaction, video isn’t a novelty. It’s the next battleground.

Which brings us to valuation. Alphabet trades at 19.9 times forward earnings. That’s a discount to the S&P and a steal relative to other tech names. 

Historical averages suggest a floor closer to 23 or 24 times. Apply that to FY26 earnings and you’re looking at a 15% upside from current levels. That’s without factoring in any premium for the AI roadmap, which is starting to look more like a blueprint than a guess.

The market, as it often does, is telling a loud story that doesn’t quite match the numbers. The narrative is disruption. The reality is adaptation. 

Google’s not the deer in the headlights. They’re the car.

Yes, risks remain. Regulatory noise never disappears. AI may move faster than expected. But you’re not buying Alphabet at peak optimism. You’re buying it at a point where skepticism has crowded out common sense.

This is where the contrarian playbook kicks in. You buy the misunderstood giants while the market chases the new shiny thing. You lean into value when others lean into fear.

The real story here isn’t that Google might lose search. It’s that they’re quietly rebuilding it, wrapping it in AI, and preparing to monetize the next era before the rest of the world even agrees what to call it.

There’s nothing sexy about value at scale. But then again, neither is a pocket ace. Until the river flips your way.