Apple's stock price surged overnight following the Google antitrust ruling, with investors happy that Apple's lucrative Safari default search engine payments will continue without issue.

On Tuesday, a federal ruling in Google's antitrust case against the Department of Justice allows Google to maintain payments to distributors for favoring its products and services. To Apple, this is a massive ruling that maintains a deal to keep Google as the default search in Safari.

The ruling, which lets Google continue to pay Apple in a deal valued in the region of $20 billion per year, was certainly welcomed by investors in the iPhone maker.

This was evident in after-hours and pre-opening trading in Apple's stock, and now it has carried on after markets opened for trading on Wednesday.

Apple's share price closed on Tuesday at $229.72, marginally up from the opening price of $229.25. However, after the ruling was issued, Apple's price spiked in post-market trading, hitting $239.13 within 30 minutes.

Trading intensity continued through to the morning, with pre-market trading keeping the price above $238, or over 3% above the Tuesday closing price.

After the market opened for the day on Wednesday, AAPL dipped from its opening at $237.20, but after 15 minutes, it still stayed above its Tuesday end price at around $235.

Before markets opened, there was the prospect of Apple's share price hitting a new high for the year. The current record for 2025 is $247.10.

Maintaining the status quo

The ruling is something that is extremely valuable to Apple, despite Google being the main target. Even for a company of Apple's size, $20 billion is a lot of money to suddenly see disappear from its Services revenue.

It's arguable that the search preference deal is not a massive benefit to Google, as users will generally pick its search engine from a list. Users are very territorial when it comes to online services they use every day.

If the court decided that the deal should be revoked, that's a pile of money that Apple would suddenly not receive each year. But, at its level of revenue, it's also not a giant amount it would scramble to recoup in other ways.

While Apple doesn't have its own in-house search engine, aside from features like Spotlight, it was always thought that the Google search deal blunted any ambition in that direction.

With the rise of AI services, including the integration with ChatGPT, Apple may not even move into plain search at all, even if it suddenly "lost" $20 billion.

Now that income is safe from the antitrust case for the moment, Apple has even less desire to move in that direction.