How much a stock's price changes over time is a significant driver for most investors. Not only can price performance impact your portfolio, but it can help you compare investment results across sectors and industries as well.
The fear of missing out, or FOMO, also plays a factor in investing, especially with particular tech giants, as well as 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 comprises Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace. Its key capabilities include AI infrastructure, database and analytics, collaboration tools, cybersecurity and generative AI.
Other Bets combines multiple businesses and generates revenues primarily from healthcare-related and Internet services.
Bottom Line
Putting together a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of research, patience, and a little bit of risk. For Alphabet, if you bought shares a decade ago, you're likely feeling really good about your investment today.
According to our calculations, a $1000 investment made in August 2016 would be worth $8,520.37, or a gain of 752.04%, as of August 21, 2026, and this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.
In comparison, the S&P 500's gained 249.97% and the price of gold went up 221.63% over the same time frame.
Analysts are anticipating more upside for GOOGL.
Alphabet's AI-led product cycle is strengthening Search, Cloud and subscriptions, while lower AI serving costs and deeper enterprise adoption support long-term monetization. Search and YouTube remain durable cash generators, and Cloud is scaling rapidly as customers adopt AI infrastructure and security. Alphabet's integrated stack and substantial liquidity provide room to fund innovation. These positives are offset by rising capital intensity, weaker free cash flow and a larger debt load. Advertising concentration, legal remedies and intense AI competition also create uncertainty around margins and returns. Higher infrastructure spending could weigh on near-term cash generation and profitability. With demand momentum balanced by heavier investment and regulatory risk, the shares present a more even risk-reward profile.
The stock is up 7.23% over the past four weeks, and no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 17 higher, for fiscal 2026. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.
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Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL): Free Stock Analysis ReportThis article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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