Sells ads against search results made valuable by 25 years of continuously updated web indexing.
Most companies in its industry are interface businesses; this one is an attention business
Alphabet runs Google Search, which works by scoring every page on the crawlable web based on how many other pages link to it, then selling ad slots against the intent signal embedded in each query. Every time someone searches and clicks a result, that interaction feeds back into the ranking model, so 25 years of accumulated click-through data have made the index progressively more accurate in a way no new search engine can replicate without first running a comparably large search engine for a comparable stretch of time. The advertising auction prices that fund the whole operation depend on advertisers trusting those search results, so if result quality slips — because crawl coverage degrades or because content migrates into closed social platforms whose pages expose no links for PageRank to count — advertiser confidence falls, auction prices compress, and there is less money available to maintain the infrastructure that keeps the index fresh in the first place. The same data flows that refine search quality extend across Android, Chrome, and YouTube, so each of those surfaces both deepens Alphabet's picture of user intent and helps pay for the crawling infrastructure that makes search worth advertising against.
How does this company make money?
Most revenue comes from Google Ads: businesses bid for their links to appear when someone searches a specific term, and Google charges them each time a user clicks. YouTube earns money the same way — ads run before and during videos, and Google shares a portion of that revenue with the creators. Google Cloud charges businesses a recurring subscription to rent computing infrastructure. The Google Play Store takes a 30 percent cut of every app purchase and every in-app transaction made through it.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Android phone manufacturers are tied in because their devices need Google Play Store certification, and their customers expect Google's apps to be there. YouTube creators cannot simply move because their subscribers, their watch history, and their ability to earn ad revenue are all attached to the platform's recommendation algorithm — rebuilding that elsewhere would mean starting from zero. Enterprise customers using Google Workspace have their email, shared documents, and calendars woven together across their entire organization, making switching something that would have to be coordinated across every employee at once.
What limits this company?
As the web grows, keeping the index up to date requires more bandwidth, more storage, and more computing power all at once — not just one of the three. If any one of those resources hits a ceiling, the freshness of the entire index starts to slip, and the intent signal advertisers are paying for becomes less reliable.
What does this company depend on?
Google cannot operate without internet backbone connectivity to crawl the web, its own data center infrastructure spread across multiple continents, partnerships with Android device manufacturers to distribute its mobile operating system, the YouTube creator ecosystem that supplies the video content people search for, and Chrome browser distribution deals that put its browser on devices by default.
Who depends on this company?
Digital advertising agencies depend on Google Ads to run their clients' campaigns — if Google disappeared, they would lose their primary tool for placing and targeting programmatic ads. Android smartphone manufacturers like Samsung depend on Google for the operating system their phones run and for access to the Google Play Store their customers expect. YouTube content creators depend on the platform for both their audience and their income — their subscriber base and their ability to earn money from videos are both tied to YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
How does this company scale?
Once the search algorithms and ad-serving systems are built, handling one more search or serving one more ad costs almost nothing extra — that part scales cheaply. What does not scale easily is keeping the web index fresh: as the internet grows, crawling and storing it requires proportionally more computing power, bandwidth, and storage, and that cost never stops rising.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
The European Union's Digital Services Act and GDPR require Google to change how it handles user data and explain how its algorithms work, which forces ongoing operational adjustments. China's Great Firewall blocks Google's services entirely, cutting off one of the world's largest populations as a revenue source. In the United States, antitrust investigations are targeting Google's dominance in both search and advertising, which could force changes to how it operates or does business.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If large amounts of web content move into closed platforms — like private social networks or paywalled sites that block Google's crawlers and expose no links to the outside web — the link map that PageRank reads starts to go blank. That would hit hardest in exactly the areas where people are searching most: social conversations, real-time news, and short-lived content. Degraded results there would erode advertiser confidence, and auction prices would fall.
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