Google
Google LLC is an American multinational technology corporation and a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., specializing in online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, software, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence.[^c1] Founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University,[^c2] the company grew from a research project called BackRub into one of the world's most valuable companies, with a market capitalization of $4.71 trillion as of May 2026.[^c3] The name "Google" was derived from a misspelling of "googol," the number one followed by 100 zeros.[^c4]
The majority of Google's revenue comes from advertising through AdMob, AdSense, and DoubleClick.[^c5] In 2025, Alphabet posted a record $403 billion in annual revenue,[^c6] with Google alone projected to capture $213.3 billion, or 85.8 percent of the global search advertising market.[^c7] As of 2026, Google has over a dozen services with more than 1 billion users each, including Search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Photos.[^c8] The company operates a three-part business model: Google Services (search, YouTube, Play Store), Google Cloud, and Other Bets led by Waymo. Google developed Gemini as a ChatGPT competitor,[^c9] and its Gemini app reached over 900 million monthly active users by May 2026.[^c16]
In the first quarter of 2026, Alphabet reported revenue of $109.9 billion, up 22 percent year-over-year, with net income of $62.58 billion, up 81 percent.[^c10] Capital expenditure for 2026 is projected between $180 billion and $190 billion, primarily for AI infrastructure.[^c13] In June 2026, Alphabet announced an $84.75 billion equity offering — the largest in its history — to fund AI compute infrastructure, with Berkshire Hathaway committing $10 billion as anchor investor.[^c11][^c22] Google Cloud reported $20 billion in quarterly revenue, growing 63 percent year-over-year, with a $462 billion cloud backlog.[^c12] In the same month, Google entered a $30 billion cloud computing agreement with SpaceX to secure 110,000 Nvidia GPUs as bridge capacity for its Gemini Enterprise platform.[^c23]
Competitive challenges
Despite these financial results, Google's long-standing dominance in online search and advertising showed signs of structural erosion in the AI era. Though Google still controlled approximately 90 percent of the search market, competitors gained ground. Microsoft's Bing reached 1 billion users for the first time,[^c25] and the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo saw install rates jump by up to 40 percent weekly, with rates rising as much as 75 percent after Google's I/O announcements in May.[^c24][^c28] Over the past month, Google's search engine traffic was down slightly.[^c27]
A growing share of user queries ended without generating any traffic to external websites. Analyses from data panels showed that roughly 68 percent of all Google searches ended without a single click to an external site.[^c26] Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch stated that his teams had planned "as if search is zero," reflecting publishers' declining reliance on Google search referrals.[^c29] A Pew Research study found that about half of Americans felt more concerned than excited about AI in their daily lives, contributing to interest in non-AI search alternatives.
AI and product developments
Google I/O 2026, held on May 19–20, was overwhelmingly AI-focused, with CEO Sundar Pichai stating that Google is now building every product around Gemini.[^c15] Major announcements included Gemini 3.5 Flash as the default model, Gemini Omni (a multimodal world model generating video), and Gemini Spark (a persistent personal AI agent). Google also unveiled Android XR smart glasses in partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm, Googlebook AI laptops running the Android-ChromeOS hybrid Aluminium OS, and Wear OS 7 with Gemini integration. In January 2026, Apple and Google announced a multi-year partnership to integrate Gemini into Apple Intelligence, marking a major deepening of their strategic relationship.[^c14]
In May 2026, Google and Blackstone announced plans to form a new AI cloud computing company with $5 billion in equity from Blackstone, targeting 500 megawatts of TPU-based compute capacity by 2027.[^c17] In a separate development, a Google software engineer was charged with insider trading for using confidential search data to place $2.7 million in bets on the Polymarket prediction platform.[^c18] Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis attended the G7 summit in France alongside OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs, in a rare meeting of rival AI leaders with world leaders.[^c19]
In Other Bets, Verily restructured as an independent corporation in March 2026 after Alphabet spent 2.5 years decoupling it from Google's infrastructure,[^c20] while Calico's decade-long AbbVie partnership ended in November 2025 following a Phase 2/3 trial failure.[^c21]