The wedge between the two versions of this number is 18.4 percentage points [1], which is about 36% of the reported growth rate [2]. That portion sits in other income: both companies recognized unrealized gains on investments there [5], so the lift reflects the marked value of stakes they still hold rather than money a customer paid.
Both beats landed at almost exactly 3.2 times consensus [3]. That symmetry says more about the estimates than about the businesses. Sell-side models cover ad load and cloud consumption; nobody publishes a quarterly forecast for a revaluation of a private AI holding, so the portfolios arrive as a surprise every time they move.
Removing the two names does not fully clean the data. Communication Services is up 116.9% year over year, which FactSet's John Butters attributes largely to mark-to-market gains on AI infrastructure investments [13]. Energy's 146.3% has a more legible driver in firm fuel prices [12]. One of those is a price anyone can look up. The other is a valuation exercise performed at quarter end.
What survives the scrubbing is a streak. The index is on its seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit earnings growth, which puts the start in Q4 2024 [10][5], before the AI infrastructure buildout that has dominated this year's coverage. Even with the two companies excluded, this would be the strongest quarter since Q3 2021, and still eight points below that quarter's 40.6% [9][4]. The operating result is good. It is not the best since the 2021 rebound, which is what the headline figure implies [3].
The earnings calls track the accounting. "AI" has been cited on 305 calls this quarter against 162 for "tariff" [15][16], a ratio of roughly 1.9 to one [6]. "Tariff refund" shows up on 35 calls [16], about a fifth as often as "tariff" itself [7], while "inflation" appears on 193 [17]. Executives are discussing the thing that is moving their reported earnings far more than the cash refunds that would move their actual bank balances.
Fortune's CFO Daily framed the index growth rate as a pulse check for the market and the broader economy, and called the pulse racing [18]. Part of what is racing is a revaluation at two companies, recorded in a line item that can subtract next quarter as easily as it added in this one. For a finance team benchmarking its own quarter against the index, the headline comparison includes two investment portfolios it does not own.
