How Old Is Google? The Founding Date and the Full Timeline

Short answer

• Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, 1998. Counting from that date, Google turned 28 years old on September 4, 2026, so it is 28 as of October 2026.
• Google celebrates its birthday on September 27, a date it settled on in 2006. The company's own doodle chief has admitted that even Google treated the exact day as a moving target in the early years.
• The search engine is older than the company. It began in January 1996 as a Stanford research project called BackRub, which makes the technology about 30 years old.
• Since October 2, 2015, "Google" has officially meant the largest subsidiary of a parent company, Alphabet Inc., not the whole enterprise. In September 2017 the subsidiary changed its legal form and name to Google LLC.
• The other candidate starting points: Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995, and the google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997.

Ask how old Google is and most answers online get the arithmetic subtly wrong, because the question hides three different birthdays. There is the day the company was legally incorporated, the day Google chooses to celebrate each year, and the earlier start of the research project that became the search engine. The dates differ by weeks in one case and by more than two years in another, which is how so many pages end up calling Google 27 in a year when it has already turned 28. This article pins down each date from the company’s own record and filings, shows the arithmetic, and then walks the full timeline so you can see what the word “Google” meant at each stage.

The Direct Answer, With the Arithmetic Shown

A company’s age is normally counted from its incorporation, the day it became a legal entity. For Google that date is September 4, 1998, when Google Inc. was incorporated in California. Encyclopaedia Britannica uses this date, Google’s own company history is built around it, and the founders’ later filings repeat it.

The arithmetic is simple subtraction, but it has to be done at the right moment of the year:

• On September 4, 2026, exactly 28 years had passed since September 4, 1998. Google turned 28 on that day.
• Before September 4, 2026, Google was still 27, which is why pages written or last updated in the first eight months of 2026 often say 27. Pages that still say 27 in the autumn of 2026 are out of date.
• As of this article’s publication in late October 2026, Google is 28 years old, about seven weeks past its 28th anniversary.

Two honest qualifications belong with that answer. First, a small number of older references, including early Google material quoted in reporting from 2011, give September 7, 1998 instead. The date used consistently in modern reference works and in Google’s own history summaries is September 4, and it is the date this article and the wider record rely on. Second, incorporation is a convention. The founders had been working on the search engine for more than two years before the paperwork existed, and the sections below count the company’s age from each of its plausible starting points so you can see how the answers 28, 29 and 30 are all defensible answers to slightly different questions.

Why Google Celebrates on September 27 Instead

If Google was incorporated on September 4, why does a birthday doodle appear on the homepage every September 27? Because Google picked a party date, and for years it could not settle on one.

Google’s first birthday doodle ran on September 27, 2002, marking the company’s fourth birthday. The date then wandered: the fifth birthday was marked on September 8, 2003, the sixth on September 7, 2004, and the seventh on September 26, 2005. From the eighth birthday in 2006 onward, the company has used September 27 every year.

Google has never given one crisp official reason, and its own staff have been cheerfully vague about it. On the company’s 15th birthday in 2013, Ryan Germick, who leads the doodle team, was quoted admitting: “When’s Google’s birthday? I’m not sure even we know; we’ve celebrated on September 7th, 8th, 26th, and, most recently, the 27th.”

The explanation most often reported, including in The Independent’s 2013 account, ties the fixed date to a competitive milestone from September 2005. Yahoo had claimed its search index was larger than Google’s. Google responded that month by announcing a major expansion of its own index, in a post by engineer Anna Patterson that framed the enlargement around the company’s birthday, and it quietly stopped publishing an exact page count at the same time. The anniversary of that announcement, September 27, became the date that stuck the following year. Treat that as the company’s lore rather than a documented ruling: the verifiable facts are the wandering early dates, the fixed September 27 from 2006, and Google’s own admission that the choice was never precise.

For anyone calculating age, the practical rule is this: September 27 is the birthday Google celebrates, September 4 is the birthday it legally has. In 2026 the doodle marked 28 years, which agrees with the incorporation count for once, because both dates fall after the anniversary.

Before the Company: BackRub and the Stanford Years, 1995 to 1998

Google’s own company history opens in 1995, when Larry Page was considering Stanford for graduate school and Sergey Brin, already a student there, was assigned to show him around. By 1996 the two were collaborating on a search engine built for Stanford’s internal use.

The project began in January 1996 and was nicknamed BackRub, because the system checked a page’s backlinks, the links pointing to it from other pages, to estimate its importance. That idea became PageRank, the algorithm that ranked pages by the quantity and quality of their inbound links rather than by how often a search term appeared on the page. The name BackRub described the method honestly and marketed it terribly, so in 1997 the project was renamed.

The new name, as the company tells it, is a play on “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, coined by Milton Sirotta, the young nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. The word fit the mission of organizing an enormous amount of information. In the version of the story told at Stanford and repeated by the company, graduate student Sean Anderson checked whether googol.com was available, typed google.com by mistake, and the error turned out to be free and catchier. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997.

Through 1997 and into 1998 the renamed engine ran on Stanford’s servers and drew users far beyond the university. Page and Brin tried to sell the technology to established portals and were turned down, a detail the founders have retold often because it explains why the next step was a company of their own.

August and September 1998: A Check, a Garage, and Incorporation

In August 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, saw a demonstration and wrote the pair a check for $100,000. As Google tells the story, the check was made out to “Google Inc.,” a company that did not yet legally exist, which made incorporating it an urgent errand. The same month produced the first Google doodle, a stick figure placed behind the logo’s second “o” to tell users the founders were away at the Burning Man festival.

On September 4, 1998, Google Inc. was incorporated. With the investment in hand, the team moved out of the dorm rooms and into a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, rented from Susan Wojcicki, who would later become an early Google executive and eventually the CEO of YouTube. The company ended 1998 already noticed: PC Magazine included Google in its top 100 websites of the year.

This is the moment the company’s age is counted from, and it is worth being precise about what existed on that date: a legal company, a working search engine with a growing audience, a rented garage, and no revenue model worth the name. The business arrived two years later.

The Full Timeline

Date	Event	What “Google” meant at the time
1995	Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford	Two graduate students
January 1996	BackRub research project begins	A university research project
September 15, 1997	google.com domain registered	A named project still hosted at Stanford
August 1998	Bechtolsheim’s $100,000 check; first doodle	A project about to become a company
September 4, 1998	Google Inc. incorporated	A company, working from a Menlo Park garage
October 23, 2000	AdWords launches	A search company with a business model
April 1, 2004	Gmail announced	A company expanding beyond search
August 19, 2004	Initial public offering on the Nasdaq	A public company, ticker GOOG
February 8, 2005	Google Maps launches	A company building consumer products at scale
November 13, 2006	YouTube acquisition closes	An acquirer of major platforms
September 2, 2008	Chrome browser released in beta	A platform company, not just a website
August 10, 2015	Alphabet restructuring announced	Still the whole company, briefly
October 2, 2015	Restructuring completed	The largest subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
September 2017	Google Inc. becomes Google LLC	A subsidiary in a new legal form
December 3, 2019	Sundar Pichai becomes CEO of Alphabet too	A subsidiary whose chief also runs the parent
December 6, 2023	Gemini AI models announced	The flagship of Alphabet’s AI era

The Business Arrives: AdWords, Gmail and the IPO, 2000 to 2004

October 23, 2000: AdWords. Google’s original press release announces “the immediate availability of AdWords,” a self-service program letting any advertiser buy keyword advertising on the results page. It extended a premium sponsorship program begun that August, and it gave the two-year-old company the revenue engine it still runs on today, now under the name Google Ads.

April 1, 2004: Gmail. Google announced a free email service offering 1,000 megabytes of storage at a time when rival free accounts offered a few megabytes. Because the announcement landed on April 1 and Google was famous for April Fools’ jokes, much of the press initially treated it as a prank. It was real, and it marked Google’s move from a single product into a suite.

August 19, 2004: the IPO. Google sold shares to the public in an unusual Dutch auction. The final prospectus figures: 19,605,052 Class A shares priced at $85 each, roughly $1.67 billion in gross proceeds, with trading beginning on the Nasdaq on August 19, 2004 under the ticker GOOG. From this date you could own a piece of the five-year-old company, and from this date its age also became a matter of public record in SEC filings, which is one reason the founding dates in this article can be checked rather than merely repeated.

From Search Engine to Platform, 2005 to 2008

February 8, 2005: Google Maps. Google’s own retrospective confirms the date: “On Feb 8, 2005, Google Maps was first launched for desktop.” The draggable, tile-based map was a technical landmark and a sign that Google’s second decade would be about products, not only search results.

October and November 2006: YouTube. Google announced on October 9, 2006 that it would acquire the video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006, as recorded in Google’s announcement and its SEC filing: YouTube’s shareholders received 3,217,560 Google shares plus further restricted stock and warrants, with part of the equity held in escrow for a year. Google paid for a company that was itself not yet two years old, and the purchase looks different once you notice Google was only eight.

September 2, 2008: Chrome. Google released its own web browser, Chrome, in beta for Windows on September 2, 2008, announced the day before in a company blog post and a comic book. A ten-year-old Google was no longer content to be a destination inside other companies’ browsers.

2015: Alphabet Changes What the Word “Google” Means

On August 10, 2015, co-founder Larry Page published a blog post titled “G is for Google” announcing a new parent company, Alphabet Inc. Page described Alphabet as “mostly a collection of companies,” the largest of which would be a slimmed-down Google holding the core internet businesses: Search, advertising, YouTube, Maps, Android and Chrome. The ventures furthest from those products, such as the X research lab and the life sciences work that became Verily, would sit directly under Alphabet as separate companies, the “Other Bets.”

The restructuring was completed on October 2, 2015, when Alphabet replaced Google Inc. as the publicly traded company, as Alphabet’s SEC filing records. Every Google share converted into an Alphabet share under the same GOOGL and GOOG tickers, and Google became a wholly owned subsidiary. Sundar Pichai became CEO of the subsidiary Google; Page ran Alphabet.

This matters for the title question. A company founded in 1998 plainly has one age, but since 2015 the name “Google” has referred to a part of a larger group, and Alphabet itself dates only from 2015. When someone says “Google is 28,” they mean the search company whose legal line runs unbroken from the 1998 incorporation through the 2015 restructuring to today.

Two later filings complete the legal picture. In September 2017, Alphabet announced it was completing the reorganization: a new intermediate holding company, XXVI Holdings, was created, and Google converted from a corporation into a limited liability company, Google LLC, the name the operating company carries now. And on December 3, 2019, Page and Brin published a joint letter stepping down as Alphabet’s CEO and president, with Pichai becoming CEO of Alphabet while remaining CEO of Google. The founders stayed on as board members and controlling shareholders.

The Most Recent Chapter

Google marked its 25th anniversary in September 2023 with a birthday doodle that walked through its historical logos. Two months into the same season, on December 6, 2023, Google announced Gemini, its family of multimodal AI models, in a company blog post by Pichai and DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis. If the first era was search, the second platforms and the third the Alphabet structure, the current one is defined by AI, and it began when Google was 25.

So Which Age Is Right?

It depends which Google you mean, and now you can say so precisely:

• The company: 28. Incorporated September 4, 1998; turned 28 on September 4, 2026.
• The domain: 29. google.com was registered on September 15, 1997, and passed 29 years in September 2026.
• The search technology: about 30. BackRub began in January 1996, so the research project behind Google passed the 30-year mark in early 2026.
• The parent company: 11. Alphabet dates from October 2, 2015, so the group that now owns Google turned 11 in October 2026.

The standard answer to “how old is Google” is the first one, 28, because incorporation is the conventional birthday of a company. The other three explain nearly every conflicting number you will see elsewhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Google founded?

Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, 1998, in California, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The search engine behind it began earlier, in January 1996, as the Stanford research project BackRub, and the google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997.

How old is Google in 2026?

It turned 28 on September 4, 2026. Any source still calling Google 27 later in 2026 is working from an update made before its September birthday, a common error because Google celebrates publicly on September 27 and many pages were last revised early in the year.

Why does Google celebrate its birthday on September 27?

Because the company chose that date, after using several others. Its first birthday doodle ran on September 27, 2002, but the 2003, 2004 and 2005 birthdays were marked on September 8, 7 and 26 respectively. September 27 has been used consistently since 2006. Reporting ties the choice to a September 2005 announcement about the size of Google’s search index, and Google’s doodle chief has admitted the company itself was never sure of the exact day.

What was Google originally called?

BackRub. The 1996 research project was nicknamed for the backlinks it analyzed to rank pages. The ranking method itself became known as PageRank. The name Google, a play on the mathematical term “googol,” was adopted in 1997.

Is Google older than the World Wide Web?

No. The web dates from 1989 to 1991, several years before even the BackRub research project. Google is, however, older than most of the web’s biggest platforms, and it arrived early enough to organize a web that was still small enough to index completely.

What is the difference between Google and Alphabet?

Alphabet Inc., created on October 2, 2015, is the publicly traded parent company. Google, today legally Google LLC, is its largest subsidiary and holds the consumer internet businesses: Search, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Maps and advertising. Alphabet’s other subsidiaries, such as Waymo and Verily, are siblings of Google, not parts of it.

Conclusion

Google is 28 years old, counted the way companies are usually counted, from its incorporation on September 4, 1998. The confusion around that simple fact is itself a small history of the company: a research project that predates the corporation by two years, a birthday celebration that drifted for most of a decade before fixing on September 27, and a 2015 restructuring that quietly changed what the name refers to. Keep the three anchors, 1996 for the technology, 1998 for the company, 2015 for the parent, and every version of the answer you meet will resolve into one of them.

Keep reading: When Was the Internet Invented — and Who Invented It?

Sources & references

• Google (about.google), "Our Story": the story begins in 1995 at Stanford with Page and Brin; BackRub built from their dorm rooms; in August 1998 Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 and Google Inc. was officially born; first office a garage in suburban Menlo Park owned by Susan Wojcicki.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica (britannica.com), "Google Inc.": founded September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were doctoral students at Stanford.
• Google press release, October 23, 2000, "Google Launches Self-Service Advertising Program": AdWords announced as immediately available, extending the premium sponsorship program announced in August 2000.
• Google press release, April 1, 2004: Gmail announced as a test release offering 1,000 megabytes of free storage, widely mistaken at the time for an April Fools' joke.
• Google Inc. final prospectus and SEC filings, August 2004: 19,605,052 Class A shares priced at $85 per share, about $1.67 billion in gross proceeds; trading began on the Nasdaq on August 19, 2004 under the symbol GOOG.
• Google (blog.google), "A look back at 15 years of mapping the world," February 2020: "On Feb 8, 2005, Google Maps was first launched for desktop."
• Google Inc. press release and Form 8-K, November 13, 2006: Google closed its acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, issuing 3,217,560 Class A shares plus restricted stock units, options and a warrant covering a further 442,210 shares; the deal had been announced on October 9, 2006.
• Google (official blog), September 2008: Chrome announced September 1 and released in beta for Windows on September 2, 2008.
• Larry Page (Google official blog), "G is for Google," August 10, 2015: Alphabet announced as a collection of companies, the largest being a slimmed-down Google; Sundar Pichai to lead Google.
• Alphabet Inc. Form 8-K, October 2, 2015: the Alphabet merger implemented, Alphabet replacing Google Inc. as the publicly traded entity and Google becoming its wholly owned subsidiary.
• Alphabet Inc. regulatory filing and company statement, September 2017: creation of XXVI Holdings Inc. and the conversion of Google Inc. into Google LLC, completing the 2015 reorganization.
• Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google official blog), "A letter from Larry and Sergey," December 3, 2019: the founders step down as Alphabet CEO and president; Sundar Pichai becomes CEO of Alphabet as well as Google.
• Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis (Google official blog), December 6, 2023: Gemini, Google's multimodal AI model family, announced.
• Google (Doodles team), as reported on the company's 15th birthday, September 2013: doodle chief Ryan Germick on the shifting birthday dates; The Independent, 2013, on the September 2005 index announcement behind the fixed September 27 date.