Alphabet is the parent corporation of Google and has ranked among the world’s largest companies by market capitalization.
Alphabet was created in 2015 through a corporate restructuring that made Google a subsidiary. The structure separated Google’s core businesses, including Search, advertising, YouTube, and Android, from a collection of other ventures. Alphabet’s publicly traded shares are therefore the shares used to calculate the combined market value of the parent company.
Google remains Alphabet’s largest business and provides most of the group’s revenue. Other activities have included Google Cloud and “Other Bets,” a category for developing projects such as autonomous-driving company Waymo. Investors evaluate Alphabet both for its dominant online-advertising business and for its long-term technology investments.
Alphabet is sometimes incorrectly called Google’s new name. Google did not disappear: it became a subsidiary, while Alphabet became the listed parent. The company is one of the major U.S. technology companies often compared in market-cap rankings with Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia.