GOOG

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford graduate students who had built a search engine that ranked web pages by the links pointing to them rather than by counting keywords. The approach produced markedly better results than the directories and portals that dominated the early web, and the company grew quickly. Google added a self serve advertising system, AdWords, that auctioned small text ads against search queries and charged advertisers only when a user clicked. That auction model became one of the most profitable business inventions in modern commerce. The company went public in 2004 using an unusual Dutch auction process designed to widen access to the shares. It then expanded through both internal building and acquisition, buying YouTube in 2006 and the mobile software startup Android in 2005, and acquiring the display advertising firm DoubleClick in 2008. Each of those purchases became a pillar of the business years later.

The most consequential corporate change came in 2015, when the founders reorganized the entire enterprise under a new holding company called Alphabet Inc. The logic was to separate the mature, cash generating internet business, which kept the Google name, from a collection of speculative ventures grouped as Other Bets. The reorganization gave each set of activities its own management and accountability and made the financial picture clearer to investors, who could now see the profitable core distinct from the experimental projects. Page and Brin stepped back from day to day management in December 2019, handing the chief executive role of both Google and Alphabet to Sundar Pichai, who had run Google's product organization for years. The founders retained their controlling shareholdings and board seats but moved out of operational command.

The business today is reported in three segments. Google Services is by far the largest and includes Search, YouTube advertising, YouTube subscription services, the Android and Chrome platforms, the Google Play app store, hardware such as Pixel phones, and the company's various subscription products. Google Cloud is the second segment and sells computing infrastructure, data storage, security tools, productivity software through Google Workspace, and a fast growing line of artificial intelligence services to businesses and governments. The third segment, Other Bets, contains the long horizon ventures, the most prominent of which is Waymo, the autonomous driving unit. Other Bets has historically operated at a loss as the company funds projects that may take a decade or more to mature. Advertising remains the financial heart of the company, generating the large majority of revenue across Search and YouTube, though Google Cloud has grown into a meaningful and now profitable contributor.

The economic engine rests on scale, data, and distribution that compound on one another. Google Search processes an enormous share of the world's web queries, and that query volume gives the company an advertising auction with deep liquidity, where many advertisers compete for the attention of users who have signaled clear intent by typing a search. The result is high margin revenue that funds everything else. Distribution reinforces the position. Android runs on the majority of smartphones outside the United States, Chrome is the most used browser in the world, and these surfaces channel users toward Google's services by default. The company also owns much of the physical infrastructure that supports its products, including a global network of data centers and custom designed chips called Tensor Processing Units that it uses to train and run machine learning models more cheaply than relying solely on third party hardware. Each layer of this stack, from query data to ad auction to infrastructure to distribution, makes the others more durable.

Competition is intense across every line of business. In Search and digital advertising, Alphabet competes with Meta Platforms, Amazon, Microsoft, and a field of newer artificial intelligence answer engines that aim to replace the traditional search results page with direct responses. In cloud computing, it sits behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as the third largest provider, though it has been gaining share. In artificial intelligence, the rivalry with OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Meta has become the defining contest of the era, as each firm races to build more capable models and to embed them in products that hundreds of millions of people use. YouTube competes with streaming services and short video platforms such as TikTok for both viewer time and advertiser budgets. Across these arenas Alphabet usually enters from a position of scale, but scale does not guarantee victory when the underlying technology shifts.

Leadership sits with Sundar Pichai as chief executive of both Alphabet and Google. Anat Ashkenazi serves as chief financial officer, having joined in 2024 from the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. The most distinctive feature of how Alphabet is run is the concentration of voting control in the hands of the founders through a special class of shares, which insulates management from short term shareholder pressure and from hostile takeover. That structure has allowed the company to make very large, long dated investments, including tens of billions of dollars per year in data centers and chips, without needing to satisfy investors quarter by quarter on those specific bets. Critics argue the same structure reduces accountability to the broad base of public owners.

This share class arrangement is the reason GOOG and the separate ticker GOOGL both exist, and it is central to understanding the Class C stock described here. Alphabet has three classes of common stock. Class A shares, traded under GOOGL, carry one vote per share. Class B shares carry ten votes each, are held almost entirely by Page, Brin, and a small group of insiders, and are not traded on any public market. Class C shares, traded under GOOG, carry no votes at all. The Class C shares were created in a 2014 stock split, before the Alphabet holding company even existed, when Google distributed one new non voting Class C share for each existing share. The purpose was direct and openly stated. The founders wanted to issue stock for employee compensation and for acquisitions without diluting their own voting power. By paying employees and sellers in non voting Class C stock, the company could expand its share count over time while the founders kept control through their high vote Class B holdings. The practical effect is that a holder of GOOG owns the same economic claim on Alphabet's profits and assets as a holder of GOOGL, the same exposure to the share price, and the same eligibility for dividends, but no say in shareholder votes. For most individual investors the distinction has little day to day consequence, since one vote per share confers almost no influence at a company where insiders hold the majority of voting power regardless. The two tickers usually trade at very close prices, with only small and shifting gaps between them. An investor who wants any voting right at all chooses GOOGL, while an investor indifferent to voting may pick whichever class trades slightly cheaper or is more convenient.

Strategy in the current era is dominated by artificial intelligence. Alphabet has folded much of its research strength into a unified AI organization built around the Gemini family of models, which it pushes into Search, Workspace, Android, and a standalone Gemini application that has grown to hundreds of millions of monthly users. The company is spending heavily on the data centers and custom silicon needed to train and serve these models, with capital expenditure guidance for the period around 2026 set well above prior years. Google Cloud is positioned as a primary way to convert that AI investment into revenue by renting model access and infrastructure to enterprises. Beyond software, Waymo represents a long bet on autonomous transport, operating paid robotaxi service in a growing list of cities and raising large outside funding rounds to expand. The company also returns cash to shareholders, having begun paying a quarterly dividend in 2024 and authorizing very large buybacks of its Class A and Class C stock.

The risks are specific and substantial. The largest is regulatory. United States courts ruled in the mid 2020s that Google held an illegal monopoly in search, and remedies from that case threaten the lucrative default search agreements the company pays for on devices and browsers, while a separate case targets its advertising technology business and could force structural changes. Regulators in Europe and elsewhere pursue parallel actions. A second risk is technological disruption to Search itself, the core profit source, as conversational AI tools offer users answers without the traditional list of links and the ads beside them, which could compress the most valuable advertising surface the company owns. A third risk is the sheer scale of capital being committed to AI infrastructure, which will weigh on cash flow and depends on demand materializing as expected. Concentration of revenue in advertising, exposure to the economic cycle that drives ad budgets, and the governance question raised by founder voting control round out the list.

Framed for an investor, Alphabet Inc. is a company whose mature advertising and cloud businesses generate large and reliable cash flows that fund an aggressive push into artificial intelligence and a set of long horizon ventures. Its competitive moats in search, distribution, and infrastructure are deep, but they are being tested at the same moment by regulators seeking to dismantle parts of the business and by a shift in computing that could remake how people find information. The Class C shares under the ticker GOOG offer the same economic participation in that outcome as the voting Class A shares, without the vote, on a page that does not weigh whether the stock is cheap or dear at any given time.