Alphabet owns Google and became a major trillion-dollar market-cap business.
Alphabet was created in 2015 through a corporate restructuring that made it the parent company of Google and several other businesses. Google remained the group’s largest operation, with search advertising, YouTube, Android, and cloud computing among its best-known activities.
The restructuring separated Google’s core internet products from businesses and research projects that were placed under the broader Alphabet holding company. Alphabet’s shares trade publicly under the ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL.
Alphabet crossed a $1 trillion market capitalization in 2020. It is sometimes confused with Google because Google is the operating company most familiar to consumers, while Alphabet is the publicly traded parent corporation used in market-cap comparisons.