Meta stock (NASDAQ: META ) rises on report that it is building a search engine

Shares of Meta Platforms (META) are trading higher today after The information reported that the social media giant was developing its own search engine to reduce its reliance on rivals such as Google ( GOOGL ) and Microsoft’s Bing ( MSFT ). The new tool will power Meta’s AI chatbot, which will let it search the web directly to answer questions, according to someone close to the project.

This news comes just days after Meta announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters (TRI) that will provide Meta AI chatbot users with real-time news updates. In fact, Meta has been busy rolling out new features for its AI models this year. Earlier this month, it introduced a tool that can check the work of other AI for accuracy — a move that analysts see as a big step toward creating fully autonomous AI applications. On top of that, Meta released AI tools designed to help advertisers create videos on their platform.

As a result of Meta’s continuous improvement, investors seem to be quite confident about the stock’s future. Although the current sentiment is neutral, 7.4% of the portfolios tracked by TipRanks have a position in META. What’s more impressive is that the average portfolio weighting among these investors is 9.11%, meaning they expect the stock to continue to outperform given this relatively large position.

Are META shares a buy?

As for Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on META stock based on 42 Buys, four Holds and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as shown in the graphic below. After a 91% increase in the stock price over the past year, the average META price target of $628.77 per share implies an upside potential of 8.92%.

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