GOOG, The Giant Hiding in Your Search Bar: Why GOOG and GOOGL May Be the Best Growth Stock Left

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 I strongly recommend reading this article all the way to the end; your money is precious, and knowledge is what protects it.

Google Isn’t “Just” Google: Why It Trades Under Multiple Tickers

When you open your brokerage app and type “Google,” you don’t see just one stock – you see Alphabet Inc. with at least two tickers: GOOGL and GOOG.
For many investors this looks unnecessarily confusing, almost like there are two different Googles. In reality, it’s one company with a deliberately engineered share structure that tells you a lot about how management thinks about control, growth, and the future.

Alphabet today is one of the most valuable companies in the world. That alone should make us pause: this is not some boring, fully mature utility. It’s an everyday product wrapped around a gigantic, highly profitable, AI-driven technology empire.

To understand why I personally see Google as one of the best growth names in the entire market, you first need to understand how it’s listed and why those share classes exist.

GOOG vs GOOGL: Same Business, Different Power

Alphabet has three main share classes:

  • Class A (GOOGL) –
    Publicly traded
    One share = one vote
    This is the “normal” common stock that most investors think of.

  • Class C (GOOG) –
    Publicly traded
    No voting rights
    Same economic exposure to Alphabet’s profits, but with zero voting power attached.

  • Class B (unlisted) –
    Not publicly traded
    10 votes per share
    Held almost entirely by the founders and early insiders. These shares effectively lock in long-term control, even if founders own a smaller economic stake.

Why build such a structure?

1. Preserving Founder Control While Issuing Stock

Back when Alphabet created Class C (GOOG) shares, the company had a clear objective:

Issue more stock without diluting the voting control of the founders.

The company needed stock for:

  • Employee compensation

  • Acquisitions paid in shares

  • General corporate flexibility

If every new share came with one vote, the founders’ influence would gradually be watered down. Instead, Alphabet:

  • Kept Class B with 10x voting rights for founders.

  • Used Class C (GOOG) with no vote for future issuance and compensation.

This allowed them to:

  • Reward employees generously in stock

  • Buy other companies using shares

  • Maintain a tight grip on strategic direction

In other words, Alphabet explicitly chose “long-term founder vision over pure shareholder democracy.”

You can agree or disagree with that philosophically, but as an investor, it’s critical to understand that you’re buying into a controlled company.

2. Two Tickers, Almost One Price

In theory, you’d expect Class A (GOOGL) with voting rights to trade at a noticeable premium to Class C (GOOG) with no voting rights.

In practice, the price difference between GOOG and GOOGL is usually very small.

Why?

  • Most retail and even many institutional investors don’t care about voting power in a mega-cap where founders already have decisive control.

  • What matters day to day is:

    • Earnings

    • Free cash flow

    • Buybacks

    • Growth prospects

So for almost everyone other than activists or governance purists, GOOG vs GOOGL is more of a technical detail than an investment thesis.

The Stock Split: Making Google “Look Cheap” Again

Alphabet also executed a large stock split (for example, 20-for-1), applied across:

  • Class A (GOOGL)

  • Class B

  • Class C (GOOG)

The reasons were straightforward:

  • Make individual shares look cheaper on a per-share basis

  • Increase accessibility for smaller investors

  • Improve liquidity and trading volumes

The split did not change the company’s underlying value – owning 1 share before is equivalent to owning many smaller shares after – but it made Alphabet psychologically more “buyable” for many retail traders who hesitate at four-digit share prices.

“Too Familiar to Respect”: The Google Paradox

Here’s where my personal view comes in.

I think one of the biggest reasons Google is still misunderstood – even at a multi-trillion-dollar valuation – is that people are numb to it.

  • We “Google” everything.

  • We watch YouTube every day.

  • Android quietly powers billions of phones.

  • Chrome is just… there, as the default browser for half the planet.

When something becomes part of the background of daily life, people stop thinking of it as a profit machine. It stops feeling like an “investment idea” and starts feeling like infrastructure.

That familiarity creates a kind of “value blindness”:

  • Everyone knows Google.

  • But not everyone truly grasps the scale of its cash flow and the optionality built into its ecosystem.

Under the Hood: A Cash Engine Funding Aggressive AI and Cloud Bets

Let’s strip away the brand and look at structure instead of just logos and icons.

1. Enormous, Diversified Revenue Base

Alphabet generates hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue and tens of billions in net income. It is one of the most profitable companies on Earth.

Its main segments:

  • Google Services

    • Search & other ads

    • YouTube ads

    • Play Store

    • Android, Chrome, Maps, Photos

    • Hardware (Pixel phones, etc.)

    This is the cash cow, driven primarily by advertising and subscriptions.

  • Google Cloud

    • Cloud infrastructure

    • AI and data analytics tools

    • Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Meet, etc.)

    This is a high-growth business, expanding much faster than the overall company, and steadily becoming a more important contributor to profit.

  • Other Bets

    • Waymo (self-driving)

    • Healthcare and life-science plays

    • Various “moonshot” projects

    Tiny in revenue today, but they represent long-dated call options on entirely new industries.

What matters is not just the size, but the composition:

  • A high-margin, dominant ad business that throws off huge cash

  • A rapidly expanding cloud and AI business that can compound at high growth rates

  • A portfolio of long-term optionality in moonshots

This is not a single-product company. It’s a platform of platforms.

2. AI as a Second (and Third) Growth Wave

The story doesn’t stop at search ads and YouTube.

Alphabet is now in a full-scale AI arms race:

  • Launching and iterating on large language models

  • Embedding AI into search, productivity apps, and cloud offerings

  • Designing its own AI chips and infrastructure to reduce reliance on outsiders

From an investor’s perspective, this matters because:

  • AI makes existing products more profitable (smarter ads, better engagement, automation)

  • AI opens entirely new product lines and enterprise solutions

  • Owning the distribution (Search, Chrome, Android, YouTube) lets Alphabet deploy AI at scale faster than almost anyone

This is why many investors – myself included – see Alphabet not as a tired mega-cap, but as a compounding AI infrastructure and data company wearing the mask of a familiar search engine.

Why I See Alphabet as One of the Best Growth Names Left in Mega-Cap Land

Here’s the core of my thesis, reflecting the viewpoint you mentioned.

1. Massive Scale and Solid Growth

Most companies reach a certain size and then growth simply dies. Alphabet is one of the rare exceptions where:

  • Size hasn’t killed growth.

  • Scale has actually enhanced the moat.

It is:

  • Generating huge revenue and free cash flow

  • Still delivering healthy growth in key segments

  • Maintaining strong margins in many periods

For a company this large, that combination is extremely rare.

2. Embedded in Everyday Life: A Deep, Sticky Moat

Google’s products are habits, not just tools:

  • When people say “search,” they mean Google.

  • When people say “watch a video,” they often mean YouTube.

  • When companies roll out productivity suites, Gmail/Docs/Drive/Meet is one of the default candidates.

Habit + Network Effects + Data = A moat that’s extremely difficult to replicate.

That everyday familiarity is exactly why many people overlook its investment potential. They think:

“Everyone already uses Google. How much more can it grow?”

But that misses the point: it’s not just about more users; it’s about:

  • More monetization per user

  • More time per user

  • More products wrapped around the same user base

3. A Cash Machine That Self-Funds Its Future

Alphabet’s free cash flow allows it to:

  • Pour tens of billions into AI research and infrastructure

  • Expand Google Cloud without constantly diluting shareholders

  • Buy back shares while still keeping a strong balance sheet

In other words, this is a company that can fund its own disruption.

4. Controlled Company, Long-Term Horizon

Remember the share structure?

Because founders and insiders keep effective control through Class B super-voting shares, Alphabet is structurally set up to:

  • Resist short-term market pressure

  • Take multi-year bets on AI, cloud, hardware, and moonshots

  • Accept temporary margin compression for long-term gains

You’re not buying a “democratic” company; you’re buying into a long-term founder-driven strategy, for better or worse.

Personally, I see this as a net positive for a business like Alphabet, where the upside comes from thinking in decades, not quarters.

Key Risks You Can’t Ignore

No serious analysis is complete without the downside:

  • Regulation and antitrust
    Google is under heavy scrutiny for search and advertising dominance. Forced structural changes, while not guaranteed, are a real overhang.

  • AI competition
    Big Tech rivals and specialized AI players are pushing hard. If Google ever loses its central position in search or fails to monetize AI effectively, the growth story could slow.

  • Ad cycle sensitivity
    A large chunk of revenue is still tied to the global advertising cycle. In deep recessions, ad budgets can be cut, and that flows directly into Alphabet’s numbers.

  • Governance
    Some investors simply do not like dual-class or triple-class structures. The lack of real voting power for public shareholders is a permanent feature, not a bug.

Every investor has to decide where they stand on that trade-off.

Final Thoughts: The Giant Hiding in Plain Sight

Because Google is everywhere, many people treat it like digital oxygen: always there, rarely questioned, easily taken for granted.

But from an investor’s viewpoint, that ubiquity is precisely what makes it powerful:

  • Two traded share classes (GOOG, GOOGL) engineered to preserve founder control

  • A massive, diversified business still showing meaningful growth

  • Dominant consumer products plus a rapidly expanding AI and cloud engine

  • A cash machine that both defends its moat and funds the next wave of growth

In my view, that combination makes Alphabet one of the strongest long-term growth names in the global equity market, despite – or maybe because of – how ordinary it feels in daily life.

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice; any decisions you make with your money are entirely your own responsibility.

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