People open social apps to keep up with friends and enjoy content, which is not something they’ll hand off to AI agents. That gives Meta's ad revenue firmer protection than Alphabet's.
People open social apps to keep up with friends and enjoy content, which is not something they’ll hand off to AI agents.
That gives Meta's ad revenue firmer protection than Alphabet's.
An AI assistant now answers a shopper's question right at the top of Google's search results, above the paid links. Google put it there because it wants to be people's go-to AI assistant, ahead of rivals like ChatGPT. That's a trade-off, since a good answer can mean fewer clicks on its own ads. Alphabet (GOOGL -1.14%) (GOOG -1.10%) makes money from search and YouTube ads, and from cloud computing. Meta Platforms (META -1.59%), its rival in this matchup, sells digital ads across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
AGI is artificial intelligence (AI) that's as capable as a skilled worker at most jobs. The closer machines get to that level, the more both companies need an answer to one question: Does either ad business hold up once AI agents start making choices for people?
How Alphabet and Meta Score on AIball
AIball is The Motley Fool's proprietary scoring system for how well a company is positioned for the changes AI brings to its industry. It rates each company from 0 to 100 on a set of separate measures. We then combine them into one number, the AGI Score. That score weighs a company's best AI upside against how exposed its business is to AI.
The Shield score measures how much of a company's revenue is protected from AI. Alphabet and Meta lean on the same kind of revenue: digital ad auctions.
Even so, Meta holds a clear lead thanks to differing advertiser goals. Advertisers pay Alphabet to reach people who are searching for something. Ask an AI agent to book you a table for dinner, and it can handle the whole thing without ever looking at a page of search results or the ads on it.
On Meta, advertisers pay to reach people scrolling Facebook and Instagram or chatting on WhatsApp. People open those apps to see what friends are up to, watch videos, and pass the time. Nobody hands that off to an AI agent, so Meta's ads keep reaching real people. That's crucial for a company that got roughly 98% of its revenue from ads in 2025.
More than 3.5 billion people used Meta's apps each day as of late 2025, and that audience gives Meta real pricing power. In the second quarter of 2026, the average price per ad across its apps rose 12% from a year earlier.
Averytin News Financial update.