Wall Street has long been known to chase the flashiest names of the moment. The past couple of years have seen investors going after artificial intelligence (AI) chipmakers, meme stocks, and some highly sought-after initial public offerings (IPOs).
However, real long-term wealth is built by investing in fundamentally strong, high-quality stocks trading at reasonable valuation levels. Some of them may have never come into the limelight, while others may have slipped out of the market's favor.
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Companies like Alphabet (GOOG -0.18%) (GOOGL -0.16%) and ServiceNow (NOW -1.31%) -- once considered market favorites -- are no longer commanding the same level of hype. Yet they are both operating businesses with solid competitive moats and durable advantages.
Here's why they have now become monster stocks that can be brilliant picks for the next decade.
Alphabet
Alphabet's stock is down by almost 13% so far in 2025 -- largely due to investor concerns about the rising threat of competition from AI-powered chatbots to its core search engine business. But recent data paints a much more optimistic picture.
Google still commands an 89.6% share of the global search engine market as of April 2025 -- just slightly lower than the 90.9% share in April 2024. The business is still seeing double-digit revenue growth. Its AI Overviews feature, Google's AI-powered results, now see almost 1.5 billion users monthly.
Behind the scenes, the company has integrated Gemini models across all 15 of its products, which serve over 500 million users. Its Gemini 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash models are setting benchmarks in reasoning, coding, math, and science capabilities.
To support these advancements, the company is investing aggressively in AI-optimized TPUs and GPUs, which is further complemented by its strong network of over 2 million miles of fiber and 33 subsea cables. The company's Ironwood TPU delivers a 10-fold jump in computational power while doubling the energy efficiency in large-scale inference workloads.
Google Cloud is also becoming a significant growth catalyst, with revenue rising 28% year over year to $12.3 billion and operating margin expanding from 9.4% to 17.8% in the recent first quarter. Google Cloud's AI infrastructure and solutions, such as the Vertex AI platform, Agent Development Kit, and Agent Designer, are also seeing strong demand.
Then there's Waymo, which is still largely ignored. The autonomous driving business is also growing fast -- and reported over 250,000 paid passenger rides per week in the first quarter, a fivefold increase from a year ago.
Alphabet now trades at approximately 18.5 times forward earnings, well below the five-year average of 24.2. The company is navigating regulatory scrutiny, antitrust investigations, lawsuits, and volatile ad spending in an uncertain macroeconomic environment -- but its strong fundamentals are intact. Hence, the company is an attractive buy for long-term investors ready to ignore short-term noise and hold the stock for the decade ahead.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow's stock has been moving mostly sideways in 2025. However, the company has quietly established itself as an "AI platform for business transformation." Its first-quarter results were stellar, with subscription revenue growing 19% year over year to $3 billion. The company's current remaining performance obligations (cRPO), a metric used to gauge revenue visibility over the next 12 months, rose 22% year over year to $10.3 billion.
What differentiates ServiceNow is its unified platform approach. While competitors offer fragmented point solutions, ServiceNow offers a comprehensive platform to streamline and automate digital workflows across various business functions.
Enterprises, especially large ones, are buying in. The company closed 72 deals with net new annual contract value (ACV) exceeding $1 million in the first quarter, up from 63 in the same quarter a year ago. The company also counts over 500-plus customers with more than $5 million in annual contract value, up 20% year over year.
AI is increasingly becoming a critical part of its offerings. The AI-powered Now Assist suite is gaining traction. The number of Pro Plus deals (a higher-tier subscription package with AI products) more than quadrupled year over year in the first quarter, with 39 involving three or more Now Assist products.
The technology supporting Now Assist products is also evolving. ServiceNow RaptorDB, a next-generation database for AI workloads, has demonstrated a significant performance leap: 53% improvement in transaction times, a threefold increase in transactional throughput, and 27 times faster analytics in its early implementation. The company has further strengthened its AI capabilities by acquiring AI company Moveworks for $2.9 billion.
ServiceNow is now expecting Now Assist to reach $1 billion in annual contracted business by 2026, up from $250 million today. The company has deployed over 200 agent-powered use cases in production, generating $325 million in annual savings.
Currently, the shares are priced at 57.5 times forward earnings, which may appear expensive at first glance. But that is significantly discounted compared to its five-year average of 234. The valuation also looks justified given its strong growth profile and $10.9 billion cash reserve on the balance sheet.
