Alphabet is the company that owns Google and uses Alphabet as its corporate name. Google’s founders created Alphabet in 2015 as a holding company, making Google one of its major subsidiaries.
The restructuring separated Google’s core internet businesses from a collection of newer or experimental operations. Google retained products such as Search, YouTube, Android, and Google Cloud, while Alphabet’s other businesses included ventures associated with health technology, autonomous vehicles, and long-term research. The arrangement also placed Sundar Pichai in charge of Google, while Larry Page became Alphabet’s chief executive.
Alphabet is regularly included among the world’s largest companies by market capitalization because of Google’s advertising business and its growing cloud and subscription operations. A common mix-up is to call Alphabet simply “Google”; Google remains the better-known operating brand, but Alphabet is the publicly traded parent whose shares represent the wider corporate group.