Google

Google LLC is an American search company incorporated on 4 September 1998 by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. From the precision advantage of the PageRank algorithm it expanded into advertising, the Android OS, the Chrome browser, YouTube, Google Cloud, and Google DeepMind, and in 2015 was reorganised as a subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet. Alphabet's 2025 Form 10-K reports revenues of US$402.8 billion and operating income of US$129.0 billion. With DeepMind now integrated, Google competes at the AI frontier alongside OpenAI and Anthropic.

PageRank, then everything else

In 1996 Page and Brin developed an algorithm — later PageRank — that ranked web pages by the citation graph of their inbound links, as a Stanford research project named "BackRub". The paper that described the resulting system, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (1998), carries Brin's name first, then Page's. Andy Bechtolsheim's US$100,000 cheque was written in August 1998, before there was a company to bank it in; Google was incorporated the following month and set up in a rented Menlo Park garage. AdWords launched in 2000, and by the account in Google's own 2004 registration statement the company's first profitable year was 2001, at net income of US$6.99 million, rising to US$99.7 million in 2002 and US$105.6 million in 2003. The August 2004 IPO valued the company at US$23 billion. Gmail (2004, with a then-unprecedented 1 GB inbox), Maps (2005), the YouTube acquisition (US$1.65 bn, 2006), DoubleClick (US$3.1 bn, 2007), the Chrome browser (2008), and Android 1.0 (2008) followed in rapid succession.

Larry Page returned as CEO in 2011. In August 2015 Sundar Pichai became Google CEO and Page CEO of the newly formed parent Alphabet; since 2019 Pichai has held both roles. The January 2014 acquisition of DeepMind — reported at around GBP 400 million, a figure Google has never confirmed — combined with Google Brain's 2017 Transformer paper and BERT in 2018, laid the groundwork of the LLM era. After the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT reportedly put Google into a "code red", Bard was rushed out in February 2023 and Google Brain and DeepMind were merged into Google DeepMind in April. Gemini 1.0 followed in December 2023, AI Overviews entered US search in May 2024, and Gemini 3 (November 2025) was widely judged to match or surpass OpenAI's frontier.

Revenue lines, and user figures that are Google's own

Revenue lines are as reported in Alphabet's 2025 Form 10-K (total revenues US$402,836 m). Usage figures are Google's own statements, not independent measurements.

Key events

• August 2004: IPO; ticker GOOG.
• 2005: Acquires Android. The price was not disclosed; it has been estimated at about US$50 m.
• 2006: Acquires YouTube for US$1.65 bn.
• 2008: Chrome released; Android 1.0 ships on the HTC Dream.
• January 2014: Acquires DeepMind.
• August 2015: Alphabet formed; Sundar Pichai becomes Google CEO.
• 2016: AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol.
• 2017: Google Brain publishes Attention Is All You Need; BERT follows in 2018, reaching Search in October 2019 for English in the US.
• 2018: Over 3,000 employees protest Project Maven (Pentagon image analysis); Google says in June that it will not seek renewal when the contract expires in 2019.
• October 2020: US Department of Justice files an antitrust suit on search and advertising monopolisation.
• April 2023: Google Brain and DeepMind merged; Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google to speak publicly about AI risk.
• December 2023: Gemini 1.0 launched.
• May 2024: AI Overviews rolled out to US search.
• 5 August 2024: Judge Amit Mehta — not the Department of Justice, which was the plaintiff — rules that Google is a monopolist in general search services (United States v. Google).
• October 2024: Demis Hassabis and John Jumper share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold.
• September 2025: The European Commission fines Google EUR 2.95 bn over self-preferencing in ad tech.
• November 2025: Gemini 3 released. On 2 December Sam Altman circulated a memo declaring a "code red" at OpenAI, according to reporting on the memo.
• 5 December 2025: Judge Mehta enters final judgment — declining to force divestiture of Chrome or Android, but barring exclusive default-search agreements and ordering Google to share certain search and interaction data with qualified competitors.
• 11 March 2026: The US$32 bn acquisition of Wiz closes — the largest in Google's history.
• 5 August 2026: Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years, with Sanjay Ghemawat, to start an independent public benefit corporation. Demis Hassabis moves to Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet; Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP of Google DeepMind, reporting to Pichai.

Key metrics

Alphabet's 2025 Form 10-K (year ended 31 December 2025) unless stated.

• Revenues: US$402,836 m (2024: US$350,018 m) / Operating income: US$129,043 m / Net income: US$132,168 m
• Google Search & other: US$224,532 m / YouTube ads: US$40,367 m / Google Network: US$29,792 m / Google subscriptions, platforms and devices: US$48,030 m / Google Cloud: US$58,705 m / Other Bets: US$1,537 m
• Operating cash flow US$164.7 bn; capital expenditures US$91.4 bn
• Employees: 190,820 as of 31 December 2025
• Active Android devices: Google's own figure is "more than 3 billion"
• Gemini app: 750 m monthly active users at Q4 2025 (650 m the prior quarter), 950 m by Q2 2026 — company statements on earnings calls

Judge Mehta, Brussels, and the fights inside the company

By owning the entry point to the web, Google defined web architecture, SEO, the ad-tech stack, and a major slice of open-source infrastructure. The same position has made it the principal target of antitrust, copyright, privacy, and AI-safety scrutiny. The liability finding of 5 August 2024 in United States v. Google was made by the court — Judge Amit Mehta of the District Court for the District of Columbia — on the Justice Department's complaint; the distinction matters, because a court finding is not an agency determination. Mehta's final judgment of 5 December 2025 bars exclusive default-search agreements and requires Google to share certain search and interaction data with qualified competitors. Chrome and Android escaped forced divestiture, but the constraints on the underlying business model are substantial. In Europe the Commission imposed three penalties between 2017 and 2019 — EUR 2.42 bn (Google Shopping), EUR 4.34 bn (Android) and EUR 1.49 bn (AdSense), about EUR 8.25 bn in total before the Android figure was reduced on appeal in 2022 — and added a EUR 2.95 bn ad-tech fine on 5 September 2025. The DMA and the AI Act both bite from 2025.

On AI ethics, the December 2020 departure of Timnit Gebru — which Google described as a resignation and Gebru as a firing — and the dismissal of Margaret Mitchell in February 2021 provoked a continuing controversy over the place of critical research inside the company. The May 2024 AI Overviews launch produced widely circulated errors, among them an answer advising the addition of non-toxic glue to pizza sauce, and prompted backlash from publishers, the SEO industry, and educators. Internal protest movements have run continuously over Project Maven (2018) and the Project Nimbus cloud contract with the Israeli military (from 2021).

On labour, the US$90 million exit package reported by the New York Times in October 2018 as having been paid to Android co-founder Andy Rubin in the wake of harassment allegations triggered the November 2018 walkout, and intermittent layoffs in 2023-2025 cumulatively reached roughly 15,000 staff. The Dragonfly project (2018), a censored search engine for mainland China, was shelved after internal and external pressure. Mandiant (US$5.4 bn, closed September 2022) and Wiz — announced in March 2025 and closed on 11 March 2026 at US$32 bn, the largest acquisition Google has made — signal a heavier turn toward security as a strategic pillar.