How much a stock's price changes over time is important for most investors, since price performance can both impact your investment portfolio and help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.
Another thing that can drive investing is the fear of missing out, or FOMO. This particularly applies to tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.
What if you'd invested in Alphabet (GOOGL) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to GOOGL for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?
Alphabet's Business In-Depth
With that in mind, let's take a look at Alphabet's main business drivers.
Alphabet is one of the most innovative companies in the modern technological age. Over the last few years, the company has evolved from primarily a search-engine provider to cloud computing, ad-based video and music streaming, autonomous vehicles, healthcare and others. In the online search arena, Google has a monopoly with roughly 90% of the online search volume and market. Over the years, the company has witnessed increase in search queries, resulting from ongoing growth in user adoption and usage, primarily on mobile devices, continued growth in advertiser activity, and improvements in ad formats.
The company is gaining market share in cloud-computing, driven by continued strength in the Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace.
Alphabet also enjoys a dominant position in the autonomous vehicles market, thanks to Waymo’s relentless efforts. In addition, it has bolstered its footprint in the healthcare industry with its life science division, Verily. The company has also become a renowned name in the world of entertainment on the back of YouTube.
Alphabet is also known as the maker of smartwatches (Pixel Watch), laptops and tablets (Chromebooks), and smart home products (Google Nest).
Alphabet, headquartered in Mountain View, CA, runs several businesses, most of which come under Google, which includes under two reportable segments — Google Services and Google Cloud. The non-Google businesses fall under the Other Bets segment.
Total revenues were $402.84 billion in 2025, up 15% from 2024. Google Services, Google Cloud and Other Bets generated 85.1%, 14.6% and 0.4% of total revenues, respectively.
The Google Services segment includes products and services such as ads, Android, Chrome, devices, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Play, Search, and YouTube. The segment generates revenues primarily from performance and brand advertising, which remains crucial for the overall business. Ad revenues accounted for 73.2% of the total revenues in 2025.
Google Cloud is comprised of Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace. Its key capabilities include AI infrastructure, database and analytics, collaboration tools, cybersecurity and generative AI.
Other Bets is a combination of multiple businesses, generating revenues primarily from the sale of healthcare-related and internet
Bottom Line
While anyone can invest, building a lucrative investment portfolio takes research, patience, and a little bit of risk. If you had invested in Alphabet ten years ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.
A $1000 investment made in May 2016 would be worth $10,402.09, or a gain of 940.21%, as of May 28, 2026, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.
In comparison, the S&P 500's gained 258.27% and the price of gold went up 249.20% over the same time frame.
Going forward, analysts are expecting more upside for GOOGL.
Alphabet's AI-led product cycle continues to support growth across Search, Cloud and subscriptions. Search is benefitting from AI Overviews and AI Mode, which are driving higher usage and enabling new ad formats such as AI Max and direct offers in AI Mode. Google Cloud is scaling faster as enterprises adopt AI infrastructure and AI solutions, and rising backlog provides better revenue visibility over the next two years. Paid subscriptions across Google One and YouTube keep expanding, supporting a more diversified revenue mix, while Waymo's ride volumes point to steady progress in Other Bets. Alphabet retains ample liquidity, but higher debt and elevated capital spending needs limit near-term flexibility and can create volatility in free cash flow. Overall, execution gains are balanced by spending, competition and legal risk.
Over the past four weeks, shares have rallied 11.11%, and there have been 16 higher earnings estimate revisions in the past two months for fiscal 2026 compared to none lower. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.
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Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL): Free Stock Analysis Report
This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).