Google’s Gemini vs OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the heavyweight clash of the artificial-intelligence world. Back the search company to come out on top, Cantor Fitzgerald analysts said as they upgraded their rating on Google’s parent company Alphabet.
Cantor analyst Deepak Mathivanan and colleagues raised their rating on Alphabet to Overweight from Neutral in a research note on Wednesday. They raised their target price on the stock to $370 from $310.
Alphabet shares were up 1% in early trading Thursday, while the S&P 500 was off 0.3%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dipped 0.1%.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT surged into the lead in the AI race on its launch in late 2022 and the initial focus was on the threat to Google’s core search business. However, in recent months the narrative has changed as Alphabet’s launch of its Nano Banana image-generating tool in August and then its Gemini 3 model in November won over increasing numbers of users to Google’s technology.
For now ChatGPT still has the advantage in terms of user base, with Cantor’s estimates putting it at around 900 million weekly active users versus Gemini’s 650 million monthly active users.
But the lead looks to be narrowing—website traffic analysis from Similarweb suggests Gemini has risen to more than a 20% market share from less than 6% just 12 months ago, while ChatGPT has dropped to less than 65% from around 85% over the same period.
That move is set to accelerate from here, according to the Cantor analysts.
“While we see room for two AI assistants to co-exist long-term, we think the defining moats are likely to shift from “model intelligence” to “practical usefulness”—where Google has a sizable lead given the company’s decade-long investments to improve and merchandise search,” Mathivanan wrote.
The next stage in AI is widely expected to be the adoption of agents—the term for software which can take instructions and carry out multistep tasks. Users are likely to rely on a single AI assistant and Google’s ability to feed in data from its search technology, maps and payment information will make its technology superior for such use, according to Cantor.
“Google’s unique competitive advantage in grounding user AI queries etc., is likely to help the company advance these integrations in select categories, such as retail, more seamlessly,” Mathivanan wrote.
Alphabet stock is up 66% over the past 12 months, compared with a 17% gain in the S&P 500 index.
The stock has become more expensive as optimism grows. Shares are now trading at 28.6 times the earnings expected over the next 12 months, compared with the five-year average of 21.7 times.
Cantor’s Mathivanan says his $370 price target for Alphabet is based on a price-to-earnings ratio of 30 times his forecast for a blend of the company’s fiscal 2026 and 2027 earnings.
