Alphabet is the company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin that operates Google Search and has ranked among the world’s largest companies by market capitalization.
Google was reorganized under Alphabet in 2015, creating a parent company for Google and several other businesses. Sundar Pichai became Alphabet’s chief executive officer in 2019, while Page remained chief executive of Alphabet until that year.
Alphabet’s main business is online advertising, especially through Google Search, YouTube, and its advertising networks. It also reports businesses such as Google Cloud and hardware operations. The company’s class structure gives different voting rights to some shares, an important detail when comparing market capitalization with voting control.
Alphabet is sometimes confused with Google because Google remains the best-known operating company inside the group. Market capitalization changes daily with share prices, so rankings among the largest public companies can shift even when the underlying businesses have not changed.