Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Overview
As our founders Larry and Sergey wrote in the original founders' letter, "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one." That unconventional spirit has been a driving force throughout our history, inspiring us to tackle big problems and invest in moonshots. It led us to be a pioneer in the development of AI and, since 2016, an AI-first company. We continue this work under the leadership of Alphabet and Google CEO, Sundar Pichai.
Alphabet is a collection of businesses — the largest of which is Google. We report Google in two segments, Google Services and Google Cloud, and all non-Google businesses collectively as Other Bets. Supporting these businesses, we have centralized certain AI-related research and development which is reported in Alphabet-level activities. Alphabet's structure is about helping each of our businesses prosper through strong leaders and independence.
Access and Technology for Everyone
The Internet is one of the world’s most powerful equalizers; it propels ideas, people, and businesses large and small. Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is as relevant today as it was when we were founded in 1998. Since then, we have evolved from a company that helps people find answers to a company that also helps people get things done.
We are focused on building an even more helpful Google for everyone, and we aspire to give everyone the tools they need to increase their knowledge, health, happiness, and success. Google Search helps people find information and make sense of the world in more natural and intuitive ways, with trillions of searches on Google every year. YouTube provides people with entertainment, information, and opportunities to learn something new and helps support the creator economy through the YouTube Partner Program. Google Cloud helps customers solve today’s business challenges, improve productivity, reduce costs, and unlock new growth engines. We are continually innovating and building new products and features to help our users, partners, customers, and communities and have invested more than $150 billion in research and development in the last five years in support of these efforts.
4.
Table of Contents
Alphabet Inc.
Making AI Helpful for Everyone
We believe AI is a profound platform shift, one that can bring meaningful and positive change to people and societies across the world, and to our business. At Google, we have been bringing AI into our products and services for more than a decade and making them available to our users.
In 2023, we took a significant step on our journey to make AI more helpful for everyone with the introduction of Gemini, our natively multimodal AI model. In 2024, we launched Gemini 2.0, our most capable model yet. Gemini can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across, and combine different types of information including text, code, audio, image, and video. Gemini is powering AI features across our products and services that are helping people everyday. Today, all seven of our two billion-user products — Android, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Play Store, Search, and YouTube — are using Gemini.
Our Google Cloud products, including Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace, help organizations stay at the forefront of innovation with our AI-optimized infrastructure, AI development platform, world-class models, as well as assistive agents and applications.
We believe AI has the potential to solve important societal, scientific, and engineering challenges. For example, in 2020, Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold system solved a 50-year-old protein folding challenge, and in 2024, we introduced AlphaFold 3, built on the previous models, to predict the structure and interactions of all the molecules in life's processes.
We are focused on transforming our products to provide the most helpful tools to our users and customers as we deliver on our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Deliver the Most Advanced, Safe, and Responsible AI
We aim to build the most advanced, safe, and responsible AI through a full stack of robust AI-optimized infrastructure, including data centers, chips, and a global fiber network; world class research teams; and a broad global reach through products and platforms that touch billions of people and customers around the world.
We are driving efficiencies in our data centers, while making significant hardware and model improvements. For example, since we started serving AI Overviews to our users, we have significantly lowered machine costs and latency through hardware, engineering, and technical breakthroughs. Our AI-optimized infrastructure allows us to use, and offer our customers, a range of AI accelerator options, including our own custom-built Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).
Our teams across Alphabet leverage Gemini, as well as other AI models we have previously developed and announced, to deliver the best product and service experiences for our users, advertisers, partners, customers, and developers. We are using Gemini 2.0 in new research prototypes, including Project Astra, which explores the future capabilities of a universal AI assistant and Project Mariner, an early prototype capable of taking actions in Chrome as an experimental extension.
We believe our approach to AI must be both bold and responsible. That means developing AI in a way that maximizes the positive benefits to society while addressing its potential challenges, guided by our AI Principles.
Enable Organizations and Developers to Innovate on Google Cloud
AI is a major technology shift for enterprises. Globally, businesses from startups to large enterprises, and the public sector are thinking about how to drive transformation. That is why we are focused on making it easy and scalable for others to innovate, and grow, with AI. That means providing advanced computing infrastructure and expanding access to Google’s latest AI models. Our Vertex AI platform gives developers the ability to train, tune, augment, test, and deploy applications using Gemini, Imagen, Veo, and other generative AI models. Gemini for Google Cloud provides pre-packaged AI agents that can assist developers to write, document, test, and operate software as well as assist cybersecurity teams to analyze, detect, protect, and respond to threats.
Improve Knowledge, Learning, Creativity, and Productivity
As AI continues to improve rapidly, we are focused on transforming our products to provide our users the most helpful tools. Examples include AI Overviews, which allow users to ask their most complex questions, break down concepts in a format that is useful for them, or take a video and ask a question out loud, and NotebookLM, which helps users understand complex information by summarizing sources and providing relevant quotes. We are embedding the power of generative AI to continue helping our users express themselves and get things done. For example, the Gemini app allows users to collaborate with new AI features that include image generation capabilities, coding support, and app integration. Gemini for Google Workspace helps users write, organize, visualize, accelerate workflows, and have richer meetings. Additionally, we are using Gemini to improve recommendations on YouTube. We also know businesses of all sizes around the world rely on Google Ads to find customers and grow their businesses — and we
5.
Table of Contents
Alphabet Inc.
make that even easier with AI. For example, advertisers are able to use our updated image generation in Google Ads to produce high-quality imagery for their campaigns, and Demand Gen helps them reach their target audiences.
Build the Most Helpful Personal Computing Platforms and Devices
Over the years, our Pixel phones have incorporated AI compute directly into the device and built experiences on top of it. Our latest Pixel devices were built with Gemini Nano, bringing the best AI-assistive experiences to our users, such as Gemini on Pixel, Pixel Screenshots, and Pixel Studio. Our Android and Chrome operating systems enable users to access Gemini, and other Google AI features throughout their day. For example, with Circle to Search built directly into the Android experience, users can search anything they see on their phone using a simple gesture.
Moonshots
Many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, making only incremental changes. This incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, where change tends to be revolutionary, not evolutionary. Our acquisitions of YouTube and Android and subsequent launch of Chrome have matured into major platforms for digital video and mobile devices and a safer, popular browser. In Other Bets, our fully autonomous driving technology company, Waymo, is now providing fully autonomous, paid ride-hailing services to customers in multiple cities.
Our early investments in AI started out as moonshots but are now incorporated into our core products and central to future developments. We continue to look toward the future and to invest for the long term, most notably for the application of AI to our products and services, as well as other frontier technologies such as quantum computing. As we said in the original founders' letter, we will not shy away from high-risk, high-reward projects that we believe in, as they are the key to our long-term success.
Privacy and Security
We make it a priority to protect the privacy and security of our products, users, and customers, even if there are near-term financial consequences. We do this by continuously investing in building products that are secure by default; strictly upholding responsible data practices that emphasize privacy by design; and building easy-to-use settings that put people in control. We are continually enhancing these efforts over time, whether by enabling users to auto-delete their data, applying privacy technologies like on-device processing, giving people tools to control their experience, or advancing anti-malware, anti-phishing, and password security features.
Google
For reporting purposes Google comprises two segments: Google Services and Google Cloud.
Google Services
Serving Our Users
We have always been committed to building helpful products that can improve the lives of millions of people worldwide. Our product innovations are what make our services widely used, and our brand one of the most recognized in the world. Google Services' core products and platforms include ads, Android, Chrome, devices, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Play, Search, and YouTube, with broad and growing adoption by users around the world.
Our products and services have come a long way since the company was founded more than 25 years ago. While Google Search started as a way to find web pages, organized into ten blue links, we have driven technical advancements and product innovations that have transformed Google Search into a dynamic, multimodal experience. We first expanded from traditional desktop browsers into mobile web search, making it easier to navigate on smaller screens. As new types of content surfaced on the internet, Universal Search made it possible to search multiple content types, like news, images, videos, and more, to deliver rich, relevant results. The introduction of new search modalities, like voice and visual search, made it easier for people to express their curiosity in natural and intuitive ways. We took that a step further with multisearch, which lets people search with text and images at the same time. Large language models have made it possible to express more natural language queries, vastly improving the types of questions users can ask, and the quality of results. Each advancement has made it easier and more natural for people to find what they are looking for. We are now using Gemini customized for Google Search to provide our users an improved Search experience, and AI Overviews has been released in more than one hundred countries, reaching more than one billion users.
This drive to make information more accessible and helpful has led us over the years to improve the discovery and creation of digital content both on the web and through platforms like Google Play and YouTube. People are consuming many forms of digital content, including watching videos, streaming TV, playing games, listening to music,
6.
Table of Contents
Alphabet Inc.
reading books, and using apps. Working with content creators and partners, we continue to build new ways for people around the world to create and find great digital content.
Fueling all of these great digital experiences are extraordinary platforms and devices. That is why we continue to invest in platforms like our Android mobile operating system, Chrome browser, and Chrome operating system, as well as our family of devices. We see tremendous potential for devices to be helpful and make people's lives easier by combining the best of our AI, software, and hardware. This potential is reflected in our latest generation of devices, such as the new Pixel 9 series and the Pixel Watch 3. Creating products and services that people rely on every day is a journey that we are investing in for the long-term.
How We Make Money
We have built world-class advertising technologies for advertisers, agencies, and publishers to power their digital marketing businesses. Our advertising solutions help millions of companies grow their businesses through our wide range of products across devices and formats, and we aim to ensure positive user experiences by serving the right ads at the right time and by building deep partnerships with brands and agencies. AI has been foundational to our advertising business for more than a decade. Products like Demand Gen, Performance Max, and Product Studio use the full power of our AI to help advertisers find untapped and incremental conversion opportunities.
Google Services generates revenues primarily by delivering both performance and brand advertising that appears on Google Search & other properties, YouTube, and Google Network partners' properties ("Google Network properties"). We continue to invest in both performance and brand advertising and seek to improve the measurability of advertising so advertisers understand the effectiveness of their campaigns.
• Performance advertising creates and delivers relevant ads that users will click on leading to direct engagement with advertisers. Performance advertising lets our advertisers connect with users while driving measurable results. Our ads tools allow performance advertisers to create simple text-based ads.
• Brand advertising helps enhance users' awareness of and affinity for advertisers' products and services, through videos, text, images, and other interactive ads that run across various devices. We help brand advertisers deliver digital videos and other types of ads to specific audiences for their brand-building marketing campaigns.
We have allocated substantial resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web. We focus on creating the best advertising experiences for our users and advertisers in many ways, including filtering out invalid traffic, removing billions of bad ads from our systems every year, and closely monitoring the sites, apps, and videos where ads appear and blocklisting them when necessary to ensure that ads do not fund bad content.
In addition, Google Services increasingly generates revenues from products and services beyond advertising, including:
• consumer subscriptions, which primarily include revenues from YouTube services, such as YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Premium, and NFL Sunday Ticket, as well as Google One;
• platforms , which primarily include revenues from Google Play sales of apps and in-app purchases; and
• devices, which primarily include sales of the Pixel family of devices.
Google Cloud
Through our Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace offerings, Google Cloud generates revenues primarily from consumption-based fees and subscriptions for infrastructure, platform, applications, and other cloud services. Customers use Google Cloud in multiple ways such as:
• AI-optimized Infrastructure: provides open, reliable, and scalable compute, networking, and storage to enable customers to run workloads anywhere — on our Cloud, at the edge, or in their data centers. It can be used to migrate and modernize IT systems and to train and serve various types of AI models.
• Developer Platform: provides developers, through the Vertex AI platform, the ability to train, tune, augment, test, and deploy applications using Gemini and other leading generative AI models. We offer widely used first-party, third-party, and open models along with services such as vector search, grounding, and distillation to further improve the cost and quality of models.
• Cybersecurity: provides AI powered cybersecurity solutions to help customers analyze, detect, protect, and respond to a broad range of cybersecurity threats, to further strengthen security outcomes, prioritize which threats to investigate, and identify attack paths, as well as accelerate resolution of cybersecurity threats.
7.
Table of Contents
Alphabet Inc.
• Data and Analytics: provides a variety of different types of databases — relational, key-value, and in-memory — to store and manage data for different types of applications and deliver data to AI agents. Our data platform also unifies data lakes, data warehouses, data governance, and advanced machine learning into a single platform that helps users analyze data using AI models across any cloud.
• Applications: offers a broad applications portfolio, including Gemini for Google Cloud and Gemini for Google Workspace, as well as purpose-built agents for Search and our Customer Engagement Suite. AI has been used in Google Workspace for years to improve grammar, efficiency, security, and more with features like Smart Reply, Smart Compose, and malware and phishing protection in Gmail. Now, Gemini for Google Workspace brings our AI-powered agents into Gmail, Docs, Sheets and more to help users write, organize, visualize, accelerate workflows, and have richer meetings.
Other Bets
Across Alphabet, we are also using technology to try to solve big problems that affect a wide variety of industries, including transportation and health technology. Alphabet’s investment in the portfolio of Other Bets includes businesses that are at various stages of development, ranging from those in the R&D phase to those that are in the beginning stages of commercialization. Our goal is for them to become thriving, successful businesses. Other Bets operate as independent companies and some of them have their own boards with independent members and outside investors. While these early-stage businesses naturally come with considerable uncertainty, some of them are already generating revenue and making important strides in their industries. Revenues from Other Bets are generated primarily from the sale of healthcare-related services, and internet services.
Competition
Our business is characterized by rapid change as well as new and disruptive technologies. We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, including but not limited to, from:
• general purpose search engines and information services;
• vertical search engines and e-commerce providers for queries on topics such as those related to travel, jobs, and health, which users may navigate directly to rather than go through Google;
• online advertising platforms and networks, i ncluding online shopping and streaming services;
• other forms of advertising, such as billboards, magazines, newspapers, radio, and television as our advertisers typically advertise in multiple media, both online and offline;
• digital content and application platform providers;
• providers of enterprise cloud services;
• developers and providers of AI products and services;
• companies that design, manufacture, and market consumer hardware products, including businesses that have developed proprietary platforms;
• providers of digital video services;
• social networks, which users may rely on for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines;
• providers of workspace communication and connectivity products; and
• digital assistant providers.
Competing successfully depends heavily on our ability to develop and distribute innovative products and technologies to the marketplace across our businesses. For example, for advertising, competing successfully depends on attracting and retaining:
• users, for whom other products and services are literally one click away, largely on the basis of the relevance of our advertising, as well as the general usefulness, security, and availability of our products and services;
• advertisers, primarily based on our ability to generate sales leads, and ultimately customers, and to deliver their advertisements in an efficient and effective manner across a variety of distribution channels; and
• content providers, primarily based on the quality of our advertiser base, our ability to help these partners generate revenues from advertising, and the terms of our agreements with them.
8.
Table of Contents
Alphabet Inc.
For additional information about competition, see Item 1A Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Ongoing Commitment to Sustainability
Our environmental strat egy has two key pillars, supported by our dedication to accessible information and technological innovation:
• Our products: We are empowering people with information about the environmental impacts of their choices.
• Our operations: We are working to drive sustainability and efficiency across our operations and value chain.
Through our products, we have an aspiration to help individuals, cities, and other partners collectively reduce one gigaton of their carbon equivalent emissions annually by 2030.
In 2021, we set an ambitious goal to reach net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030. To make progress toward this effort, we aim to reduce 50% of our combined Scope 1, Scope 2 (market-based), and Scope 3 absolute emissions (compared to our 2019 base year) by 2030, and we plan to invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions.
Our primary approach to reducing our Scope 2 emissions is through the procurement of carbon-free energy (CFE). In 2020, we set a goal to run on 24/7 CFE every hour of every day on every grid where we operate by 2030. In 2023, we began implementing our carbon removals strategy, and we have begun establishing impactful partnerships and have started contracting for carbon removal credits.
Achieving net-zero emissions and 24/7 CFE by 2030 are extremely ambitious goals. We also know that our path to net-zero emissions will not be easy or linear. Some of our plans may take years to deliver results, particularly where they involve building new large-scale infrastructure with long lead times. Our approach will continue to evolve and will require us to navigate significant uncertainty, including the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict. In addition, solutions for some key global challenges do not currently exist, and will depend heavily on the development and improvement of new technologies by us and by the energy sector. As our business and industry continue to evolve, we expect our total GHG emissions to rise before dropping toward our absolute emissions reduction target.
For additional information about risks and uncertainties applicable to our work on sustainability and efficiency, see Item 1A Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Culture and Workforce
We are a company of curious, talented, and passionate people. We embrace collaboration and creativity, and encourage the iteration of ideas to address complex challenges in technology and society.
Our people are critical for our continued success, so we work hard to create an environment where employees can have fulfilling careers, and be happy, healthy, and perform at a high level. We offer industry-leading benefits and programs to take care of the diverse needs of our employees and their families, including opportunities for career growth and development, resources to support their financial health, and access to excellent healthcare choices. Our competitive compensation programs help us to attract and retain key talent, and we will continue to invest in recruiting talented people to technical and non-technical roles, and rewarding them well. We provide a variety of high quality training and support to managers to build and strengthen their capabilities-–ranging from courses for new managers, to learning resources that help them provide feedback and manage performance, to coaching and individual support.
As of December 31, 2024, Alphabet had 183,323 employees. We have work councils and statutory employee representation obligations in certain countries, and we are committed to supporting protected labor rights, maintaining an open culture, and listening to all employees. Supporting healthy and open dialogue is central to how we work, and we communicate information about the company through multiple internal channels to our employees.
When appropriate we partner with outside companies on a contractual basis to provide a specialized service or to temporarily cover a short-term need. The employees of our suppliers and staffing partners — vendors and temporary staff, respectively — and independent contractors who are self-employed, make up our extended workforce. We choose our partners and staffing agencies carefully, and review their compliance with Google’s Supplier Code of Conduct.
Government Regulation
We are subject to numerous United States (U.S.) federal, state, and local, as well as foreign laws and regulations covering a wide variety of subjects, and the scope of this coverage continues to broaden with continuing new legal and regulatory developments in the U.S. and internationally. Like other companies in the technology industry, we face increasingly heightened scrutiny from both U.S. and foreign governments with respect to our compliance with laws and
9.
Table of Contents
Alphabet Inc.
regulations. Many of these laws and regulations are evolving and their applicability and scope, as interpreted by the courts, remain uncertain. Particularly with regard to AI; competition; consumer protection; content moderation; data privacy and security; news publications; and sustainability and other social matters, we have seen an increase in new and evolving laws and regulations, as well as related enforcement actions and investigations, being proposed and implemented in recent years by legislative and regulatory bodies around the world. As we have seen in recent years, different laws and regulations on the same topic may not always have the same requirements, and even when requirements overlap, the rules are not always consistently implemented, interpreted, and enforced from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Our compliance with these laws and regulations may be onerous and could, individually or in the aggregate, increase our cost of doing business, make our products and services less useful, limit our ability to pursue certain business practices or offer certain products and services, cause us to change our business models and operations, affect our competitive position relative to our peers, and/or otherwise harm our business, reputation, financial condition, and operating results.
F or additional information about government regulation applicable to our business, see Item 1A Risk Factors; Trends in Our Business and Financial Effect in Part II, Item 7; and Legal Matters in Note 10 of the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Intellectual Property
We rely on various intellectual property laws, confidentiality procedures and contractual provisions to protect our proprietary technology and our brand. We have registered, and applied for the registration of, U.S. and international trademarks, service marks, domain names, and copyrights. We have also filed patent applications in the U.S. and foreign countries covering certain of our technology, and acquired patent assets to supplement our portfolio. We have licensed in the past, and expect that we may license in the future, certain of our rights to other parties. For additional information, see Item 1A Risk Factors of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Available Information
Our website is located at www.abc.xyz, and our investor relations website is located at www.abc.xyz/investor. Access to our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and our Proxy Statements, and any amendments to these reports, is available on our investor relations website, free of charge, after we file or furnish them with the SEC and they are available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov.
We webcast via our investor relations YouTube channel and website our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community. Our investor relations website also provides notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance and other items that may be material or of interest to our investors, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, and blogs. We also share Google news and product updates on Google's Keyword blog at https://www.blog.google/ and News From Google page on X at x.com/NewsFromGoogle, and our executive officers may also use certain social media channels, such as X and LinkedIn, to communicate information about earnings results and company updates, which may be of interest or material to our investors. Further, corporate governance information, including our certificate of incorporation, bylaws, governance guidelines, board committee charters, and code of conduct, is also available on our investor relations website under the heading "Governance." The information contained on, or that may be accessed through our websites or our executive officers' social media channels, is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any references to our websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.