Alphabet Inc. owns the Google search engine and is the publicly traded parent company of Google.
Alphabet was created through a corporate restructuring announced in 2015. Google became a subsidiary, while Alphabet became the holding company for Google and several other businesses and projects. Alphabet's Class A and Class C shares trade publicly, while Class B shares carry enhanced voting rights and are not publicly traded.
Google remains Alphabet's largest business, with search advertising, YouTube, Android, Chrome, and cloud computing among its major activities. Other Alphabet initiatives have included autonomous-vehicle company Waymo and life-sciences businesses.
Alphabet is frequently confused with Google because Google is the best-known operating company in the group. Market-cap rankings for Alphabet generally refer to the combined value of its publicly traded share classes, rather than to Google as a separately listed company.