Alphabet owns Google and became a publicly traded company in 2015.
Google’s founders created Alphabet as a holding company during a major corporate restructuring announced in August 2015. Alphabet became the publicly traded parent, while Google remained its largest subsidiary and continued operating the search, advertising, YouTube, Android, and cloud businesses.
The restructuring separated Google’s core internet operations from a collection of other ventures, including research and investment projects. Alphabet’s class structure also preserved different voting rights among its share classes, allowing founders and insiders to retain substantial control.
Alphabet is relevant to market-capitalization comparisons because investors generally value the publicly traded parent rather than Google as a separately listed company. A frequent mistake is to treat Google and Alphabet as competing listed corporations; Google is the operating company, while Alphabet is the listed parent.