Companies Owned by Alphabet (Google)

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Alphabet Inc. is the parent company of Google, and through Google it owns YouTube. So yes, Google owns YouTube, and Alphabet owns Google. Alphabet’s portfolio reaches well beyond search. Seven of its best-known acquisitions are YouTube, DoubleClick, Waze, Nest, Looker, Fitbit and Mandiant. They cover online video, advertising technology, navigation, smart-home devices, data analytics, wearables and cybersecurity.

How Alphabet and Google fit together

Google was founded in 1998 as Google Inc., a search engine company. Over the following two decades it expanded into video, mobile software, hardware, cloud computing and many experimental projects. In 2015 the company reorganized and created Alphabet as a new holding company above Google.

The reorganization separated the core internet business from newer, riskier ventures. Google kept search, advertising, YouTube, Android, Maps and related products. Alphabet became the publicly traded parent and holds Google alongside other companies that operate outside Google’s management structure.

Alphabet is a public company owned by its shareholders, including founders, institutional investors and individual investors. The largest are covered in our breakdown of Alphabet’s largest shareholders. Alphabet stock trades under two tickers: GOOGL for Class A shares and GOOG for Class C shares.

Not every Alphabet business is part of Google. YouTube, Waze, Fitbit, Nest, Looker and Mandiant are part of Google’s operations, while projects such as Waymo were moved out of Google and into Alphabet as separate companies.

How Alphabet makes its money

Alphabet’s revenue comes mostly from advertising. It sells two broad types:

• Performance advertising: ads tied to measurable results, such as clicks or sign-ups, that let advertisers connect with users who show intent.
• Brand advertising: ads meant to build awareness of and affinity for a brand, where the goal is recognition rather than an immediate action.

Beyond ads, Alphabet earns money from subscriptions, platforms and devices, and from licensing and service fees, including those from Google Cloud. For fiscal 2025, Alphabet reported $402.84 billion in revenue and $132.17 billion in net income. Revenue rose 15.1% over 2024, and net income rose 32%. YouTube alone produced $40.37 billion in ad revenue in 2025, before counting its subscription products.

This revenue mix shaped the company’s acquisitions. DoubleClick and YouTube fed the advertising engine directly. Looker and Mandiant strengthened Google Cloud. Nest and Fitbit built out the devices business. Waze improved Maps, which supports local search and advertising. Acquisitions also remove emerging rivals, and that side effect is the root of much of the regulatory scrutiny Alphabet now faces.

Seven major companies owned by Alphabet

The profiles below run in order of acquisition date. That order shows how Alphabet’s priorities shifted from consumer internet and advertising toward cloud, devices and security.

YouTube

• Business type: Online video-sharing platform
• Acquisition price: $1.65 billion
• Acquisition date: Nov. 13, 2006

Three former PayPal employees founded YouTube in 2005 on the idea that ordinary people would want to share homemade videos online. Growth was fast. By the summer of 2006 the site was serving more than 100 million videos a day. That growth brought technical strain, and the company had little commercial success, so it began looking for a buyer.

Google had launched its own service, Google Video, in 2005, but it attracted little traffic. Buying YouTube in late 2006 gave Google a dominant video platform instead of a struggling one. YouTube has since become a major source of Alphabet’s advertising revenue and also earns money from YouTube Premium and YouTube TV subscriptions.

DoubleClick

• Business type: Ad management and ad-serving technology
• Acquisition price: $3.1 billion
• Acquisition date: March 11, 2008

DoubleClick was founded in 1996 and became one of the stock-market stars of the dot-com era. It was a leader in the first generation of online advertising. In 2005, private equity firm Hellman & Friedman took it private in a $1.1 billion deal and became its majority owner.

Google bought DoubleClick in 2008 to improve the analysis and ad-targeting tools it offered advertisers and publishers. In 2018 Google retired the DoubleClick name and folded its products into Google Ads and the Google Marketing Platform. The technology still runs inside Google’s ad business even though the brand is gone.

Waze

• Business type: Mobile navigation app
• Acquisition price: $966 million
• Acquisition date: June 11, 2013

Waze was founded in Israel in 2008 as a crowdsourced traffic and navigation service. Drivers report accidents, slowdowns and hazards, and the app reroutes others in response. When Google bought it in 2013, Google Maps had already existed for seven years.

The deal did two things. It removed a fast-growing competitor, and it brought Waze’s real-time traffic features to Google Maps. Waze has more than 180 million users. Google first monetized it by letting businesses buy ads shown to nearby drivers, but it discontinued the Waze ad service in 2023.

Nest

• Business type: Smart-home products
• Acquisition price: $3.2 billion
• Acquisition date: Feb. 7, 2014

Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers founded Nest Labs in 2010 after leaving Apple’s iPod and iPhone division. Their first goal was to rethink the thermostat as a sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-connected device that learns a household’s habits and can be programmed remotely.

Google bought Nest in 2014 and later merged it with its Home division to form Google Nest. The line now includes security alarm systems, security cameras, Wi-Fi routers and smart home assistant devices.

Looker

• Business type: Business intelligence software and data analytics
• Acquisition price: $2.6 billion
• Acquisition date: Feb. 13, 2020

Lloyd Tabb founded Looker in 2011. At the time, most business intelligence systems required engineering or programming skills to pull and analyze data. Looker made queries read more like plain English, so non-programmers could run their own analysis.

Google announced the deal in June 2019 and completed it in 2020. Looker now operates within Google Cloud, where it helps customers analyze data, produce business intelligence and build data-driven applications.

Fitbit

• Business type: Wearable fitness devices and app
• Acquisition price: $2.1 billion
• Acquisition date: Jan. 14, 2021

James Park and Eric Friedman founded Fitbit in 2007 to build a wearable that used wireless technology to support health and fitness. Its products include fitness trackers and smartwatches, the Fitbit app, and related accessories and services.

Google announced the purchase in November 2019. The deal followed Google’s 2019 acquisition of Timex smartwatch technology. Closing took more than a year because European Union regulators reviewed the deal. They approved it with conditions meant to protect users’ health data and preserve competition in wearables. Google said the deal was about devices, not data, and committed that Fitbit user data would not be used for Google ads.

Mandiant

• Business type: Cybersecurity
• Acquisition price: $5.4 billion
• Acquisition date: Sept. 12, 2022

Mandiant specializes in cybersecurity testing and incident response. Its corporate history is complicated. FireEye bought Mandiant in 2013 for nearly $1 billion. In June 2021, FireEye sold its FireEye-branded products business and the FireEye name to private equity firm Symphony Technology Group for $1.2 billion. The publicly traded company kept the Mandiant business and renamed itself Mandiant in October 2021.

Microsoft was reportedly interested in Mandiant in early 2022. Google announced its offer on March 8, 2022, at $23 per share, roughly $5.4 billion in total. The price was a 57% premium to Mandiant’s undisturbed 10-day volume-weighted average price as of Feb. 7, 2022, the last full trading day before sale rumors spread. Mandiant was folded into Google Cloud to strengthen security for cloud customers.

Mandiant ranks as one of Google’s largest acquisitions. The biggest was Motorola Mobility, bought in 2012 for $12.5 billion. Google later sold most of Motorola’s handset business to Lenovo, which is why Motorola does not appear on lists of companies Alphabet currently owns.

How many companies Google has acquired

By one tracker’s count, Google has acquired about 262 companies over its history. Most were small startups bought for their technology or teams rather than household names, and more recent purchases have supported Alphabet’s work in artificial intelligence, robotics and cybersecurity.

Acquisitions are different from investments. Alphabet also holds minority stakes in companies it does not control, mainly through its venture arms. A minority stake does not make a company “owned by Google.”

Google spin-offs

Alphabet has also moved businesses out of Google. Three examples:

• Waymo: The self-driving car project began inside Google and was spun out in 2016 as a separate company under Alphabet. It is no longer part of Google but is still owned by Alphabet.
• Niantic Labs: The developer of Ingress was spun out of Google in 2015 and became an independent company.
• Aalyria: A high-speed communications project spun out in 2022, with Google keeping a stake in the startup.

Antitrust scrutiny of Alphabet’s acquisitions

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed antitrust lawsuits against Google, and other parties, including the Washington State Attorney General, have brought their own cases. Some cases have already been decided against Alphabet.

For investors, these cases bring a specific risk: they can limit how Alphabet grows through future acquisitions or how it combines data across the businesses it already owns.

Companies Alphabet does not own

Several large tech companies are often confused with Alphabet holdings. None of the following ownership links exist:

• Microsoft does not own Google, and Alphabet does not own Microsoft. They are separate public companies that compete in search, cloud computing and productivity software. Microsoft was even a reported rival bidder for Mandiant.
• Amazon does not own Google. Alphabet is the parent, and Amazon is a separate company that competes with Google Cloud.
• Meta does not own Google. Meta competes with Alphabet for digital advertising spending.
• Netflix is not owned by Google. It is an independent public company and competes with YouTube for viewers’ time.

FAQs

The Bottom Line

For investors, Alphabet's ownership structure clarifies what a GOOGL or GOOG share actually covers: Google, YouTube and the companies folded into them, plus separate units such as Waymo. Most of its major acquisitions were made to strengthen advertising, cloud or devices. Antitrust cases from the Department of Justice and other parties could limit future deals or how Alphabet combines data across the businesses it already owns.