How Google makes money

Most of the ad money comes from Google's own sites: Search, Maps, Gmail and the app store. Search ads are mostly paid by the click: the advertiser pays when someone taps the ad. In 2025 people clicked 6% more ads on Google's sites, and the average price of a click rose 7%. Together that's how search ad money grows.

YouTube's ads add more, and so do ads Google places on other companies' websites and apps. Google Cloud, which rents out computing power, grew 36% in a year.

Searches don't all start on Google's own pages. Google pays browser makers, phone makers and other partners so that people search with Google, and pays websites that show its ads. Its report calls these traffic acquisition costs: $59.9B in 2025, about 20.3% of its ad money. It's what Google pays to get searches and ad space, as a share of the ad money they bring in.

That share fell from 20.7% in 2024, because more of the ad money came from Google's own sites, where it pays partners a smaller share. There's a legal catch too: a US court ruled against Google in an antitrust case about how it distributes Search, and Google appealed in January 2026.

Alphabet also reports profit by part. Google's ads, subscriptions and devices together made $139.4B in operating profit. Cloud made $13.9B. The newer businesses, like Waymo, lost $7.5B.

At Alphabet, the business that earns the most pays for the bets that might become the next one. The bets are expensive: Alphabet's capital spending, mostly on data centers and servers, was $91.4B in 2025.