(NASDAQ: GOOGL) Is Alphabet Inc. a Buy?

Thinking about the big picture
I always stress how important it is for long-term investors not to get caught up in any single quarter's performance. If you plan to own a stock for five or 10 years, what happens in any three-month period is hardly important in the grand scheme of things. This same approach should be applied to Alphabet.

Yes, the market reacted negatively to the tech giant's latest earnings. But a valid question to ask is: Is this company's long-term competitive position under threat? I think the answer to that question, based on the facts, is a resounding no.

Let's focus on Alphabet's bread-and-butter search business. According to statcounter.com, it still has a monopolistic position, with just under a 92% share of the global market.

Is OpenAI's ChatGPT integration really enough for consumers to ditch Google and start using Microsoft's Bing search engine? It's a stretch for someone to believe this to be true. To be fair, the market could shift radically in the next few years, but that is almost impossible to predict. And right now Google is still the leader in search, and as a result of that, digital advertising as well.

In order to position itself for the AI wars, Alphabet has just agreed to invest $2 billion in Anthropic, an AI start-up that has created a chatbot that is a direct competitor to ChatGPT. Maybe more importantly, Alphabet is planning to launch Gemini, its internally developed generative AI model, which could be more versatile and powerful than OpenAI's offerings. This could quiet the doubters who think this business is falling behind.

Additionally, investors have to ask if the growth of AI will really bring about entirely new use cases for consumers and businesses, or if this revolutionary technology will simply improve what already exists. As of right now, it looks like the latter will happen. And "with 15 products that each serve half a billion people, and six that serve over 2 billion each," according to CEO Sundar Pichai, Alphabet already owns some of the most popular, widely adopted internet properties on the face of the planet. This gives it a huge leg up to introduce AI innovations to an existing user base.