I like to enquire how valuations change over time using the price/sales ratio, rather than price/earnings, because of the reduced volatility.

Google has higher margins than average today, with net margins now 28% versus 22% average since since 2010.

With great margins (for now), looking at the forward PE ratio of 16x makes Google look really cheap. This is a company that grew sales at 21% per year over the last 14 years, and grew earnings obviously faster than that given the rising margins. Their monopoly is well intact, and I have views about the recent AI innovations that point to a net positive for Google rather than a net negative, but that would take another long post. Google is doing everything right to incorporate AI automatically in the domain where advertising would be irrelevant. People will retain the desire for keyword such (typing and little as possible, and I'm not even talking about a whole sentence, and wanting a quick relevant answer).

But margins will revert downwards at some point. So I want to stay focused on sales.

Even looking at the P/S ratio, rather than the P/E during times of high margins, Google is still cheap today! The P/S ratio is now 5.4x and Google has only traded lower than this 12% of the time since 2010:
macrotrends.net - Price sales

Times of pessimism are the best times to invest. IV will be impacted by current events, but what Google is going to earn in 2035 didn't suddenly fall by 30% over the last 2 months. The world will be different in ten years.

Advertising is still pretty primitive and has a long way to go. I can already picture how much better advertising responses can become, compared to how primitive and ineffective they are (and still generating obscene cash for Google). Google has a huge runway ahead.

- Manlobbi