Alphabet is the publicly traded parent 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 its largest subsidiary. The change separated Google’s core internet businesses from several other projects while preserving Google as the principal operating company.
Alphabet’s major businesses include Google Search, YouTube, Android, Google Cloud, and advertising systems. Search advertising has historically supplied a large share of the company’s revenue, while YouTube and cloud computing have become important additional businesses.
A common mistake is to identify Google as the company’s stock-market name. Google remains the familiar consumer brand, but Alphabet Inc. is the listed parent whose shares trade under the symbols GOOGL and GOOG. Alphabet’s market capitalization reflects the combined value investors assign to the parent and its subsidiaries.