Businessweek Technology

Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

By Julia Love October 30, 2026 at 3:33 PM UTC

Takeaways by Bloomberg AI

When a company publishes its quarterly earnings statement, it can only hope for the best. The numbers are the numbers, and in those first minutes after release, there’s nothing the executives can do to influence what happens to the stock. There is, however, an opportunity to control the damage of an unpopular report using the earnings call. There is also the potential to make things worse, as was the case this week for Alphabet Inc.

Shares in Google’s parent company started tumbling soon after Alphabet reported its third-quarter results on Oct. 28, with both revenue and profit missing analysts’ targets. But the mood on Wall Street really darkened toward the end of the earnings call, when Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler offered a glimpse into the changing economics of Google Search.…