Often the answer is just a click or an app away: You can ask Alexa a question from your kitchen; read your news on Twitter; ask friends for information on WhatsApp; and get recommendations on Instagram and Pinterest. We face robust competition from an array of sources, including general and specialized search engines, as well as dedicated apps. Independent parties estimate that 55 percent of people in the U.S. start product searches on Amazon, not Google. And many online shoppers use Walmart, eBay and other sites. For travel searches, many people go to Expedia, Kayak, Orbitz and TripAdvisor.

For queries where we make money by showing ads—typically those queries with commercial intent—competition is particularly intense.

Improving Search

We make changes to Search to create a better experience for people. We constantly test and refine our systems, using feedback from search raters across the country and the world to measure the quality of our results. We test hundreds of thousands of potential changes each year, and launch those that make Search more useful. In closing an extensive investigation into Google Search, a bipartisan Federal Trade Commission found that our product changes were designed to “improve the quality” of search results and “likely benefited consumers.”

Our testing has consistently shown that people want quick access to information, so over the years we’ve developed new ways to organize and display results. For example, we’ve built features to show maps to people searching for directions; sample menus to people looking for a restaurant; prices and options to people looking to buy products, take a flight or find a job; and quick answers for people asking for the local time, a calculation or a unit conversion.

Search results and rankings

Just like content on the web, Search is dynamic, and websites’ rankings will rise and fall over time based on a number of factors including freshness and relevance. We drive billions of visits to sites across the web every day, and the volume of traffic we've sent to the open web has increased every year since Search was created. As we’ve developed more helpful features to organize different types of information—from images and videos to local results—we’ve also grown the average number of outbound links to websites on a search results page, from only 10 (“10 blue links”) to now an average of 26 links on mobile.

Google is an important way for smaller merchants and businesses to compete with larger competitors. On average, local results in Search drive more than 4 billion connections for businesses every month, including website clicks, phone calls, directions, food orders and reservations. And every month, Search connects people with more than 120 million businesses that don’t have a website.

Our tools help those businesses optimize how their sites perform in Search and control information that appears on our Search results page. Site owners have the control to tell our web crawler (Googlebot) what pages we should crawl and index, and they even have more granular controls to indicate which portions of a page should appear as a text snippet on Google Search. Using our developer tools, site creators can choose if they want to be discovered via Google and optimize their sites to improve how they’re presented, with the aim to get more free traffic from people looking for the information and services they’re offering.

Android

We offer Android, our open-source operating system, to device makers and carriers for free, which lowers the cost consumers pay for mobile devices. The Android model has created more choice for phone makers, app developers and billions of consumers who can now afford and use an array of cutting-edge smartphones available at every price point, including some as low as $50. Today, because of Android, there are more than 1,300 brands, 500 operators and 1.3 million app developers offering their content to global users on 2 billion devices.

Choice has always been a core tenet of Android, and it’s why consumers have always had control over which apps they use—including their keyboard, messaging app and phone system.

The same is true of app stores: Android has always allowed people to choose which app store to use. In fact, most Android devices come with at least two app stores, and consumers can install additional app stores if they’d like to. Developers can also negotiate directly with device makers or carriers to preload their apps on Android devices and consumers can download apps outside of app stores. Google Play, Google’s online store on Android, is just one of many app stores that Android users can use. This openness means that even if a developer chooses not to distribute through Google Play, they still have many other ways to distribute their apps to Android consumers. 

If a developer chooses to distribute their app on Google Play, they can access Play’s app development and optimization tools, discovery options, and distribution capabilities for free. Like many other digital content platforms, however, we charge app developers a service fee in some instances to support Google Play and Android. Google Play developers who sell digital content use Google Play’s billing system for in-app purchases of digital goods, and pay a service fee when users complete a purchase. Because the service fee is only charged when developers charge consumers, Google only makes money when developers make money, thereby aligning our business interests with theirs. 

This approach gives consumers a trusted system that allows them to safely, securely and seamlessly buy from developers worldwide. It helps us protect consumers’ payment info with multiple layers of security, using one of the world’s most advanced security infrastructures. And importantly, it enables us to keep investing in Google Play and Android, allowing it to flourish as a platform with more than 2 billion monthly active users. 

If a developer prefers not to distribute through Google Play, they can still distribute on Android through any number of competing app stores or directly to consumers—and many do. Developers are also free to communicate with their customers outside of Google Play via email or other channels to inform them of other purchase options and lower cost alternatives, process refunds or provide customer support directly. 

Maps

When people are searching for an address or a location, they’re usually looking for information to get around or explore. We’ve launched countless helpful features, including real-time traffic, transit schedules, road closures, popular times, and information about businesses like their hours of operation, menus, reservations, and delivery and curbside pickup options.

We face competition from a wide range of mapping services, including Apple Maps—which is pre-loaded as the default map on iOS devices—Mapbox, Bing, Here Technologies, OpenStreetMap, in-car navigation services, local information providers like Yelp and Tripadvisor, and more. In fact, Facebook recently acquired the street-level mapping company Mapillary as it works to grow its mapping capabilities. People choose to use Google Maps because it provides helpful, high quality information. Over the last five years, Google Maps has been downloaded on the iPhone hundreds of millions of times.

Voice assistants

When it comes to voice assistants, people expect to be able to talk to their devices. Lots of companies preload their own software, including Siri on Apple devices, Alexa on Amazon devices, Bixby on Samsung devices and Google Assistant on many Android devices. Competition in this space is fierce. In fact, Apple recently claimed Siri is the most popular voice assistant in the world and eMarketer estimates that Alexa devices represent 70 percent of the home smart speaker market. Likewise, when it comes to car infotainment systems, there is enormous competition, including Apple CarPlay, Amazon Alexa, Nuance Automotive, and others. More than 500 car models support Apple CarPlay, and more than 200 car models support Alexa.

Other free services

People used to pay large amounts of money for translation services, malware scanning, password managers, navigation systems, patent searches, photo and document storage, word processors, video conferencing and more. We’re proud that our work has made all of those services and tools widely available to everyone for free.

For digital services, when you first buy a device, it has a kind of home screen “eye level shelf.” On mobile, that shelf is controlled by Apple, as well as companies like AT&T, Verizon, Samsung and LG. On desktop computers, that shelf space is overwhelmingly controlled by Microsoft.

We have agreements with many of those companies for eye-level shelf space. But let's be clear—our competitors are readily available too, if you want to use them.

Our agreements with Apple and other device makers and carriers are no different from the agreements that many other companies have traditionally had in place to distribute software. Other search engines, including Microsoft’s Bing, compete with us for these agreements. And our agreements have passed repeated antitrust reviews. In closing a nearly two-year investigation into our Search promotion agreements, one FTC Commissioner stated: “I was not presented with any evidence to indicate that these arrangements were anything other than procompetitive.”

Here's more detail:

Apple devices

Apple features Google Search in its Safari browser because they say Google is “the best.” This arrangement is not exclusive—our competitors Bing and Yahoo! pay to prominently feature, and other rival services also appear. Changing your search engine in Safari is trivial. On desktop, one click and you’re presented with a range of options.

Microsoft

Google doesn't come preloaded on Windows devices. Microsoft preloads its Edge browser on Windows devices and Bing is the default search engine.

Android

We offer Android to device makers and carriers for free, which lowers the cost of mobile phones. The business model that enables us to make Android free is simple: unlike most mobile operating systems, we don’t charge a license fee. But we incur costs in building and maintaining Android, and we’ve invested billions of dollars to make Android what it is today.

To support that investment, we ask device makers and carriers who choose to preload Google Play to also preload Google Search and other Google apps like Gmail and YouTube. This directly reduces the price that people pay for phones. It benefits consumers who overwhelmingly prefer their phones to have basic functionality right out of the box. It helps device makers and carriers better compete with Apple. And it enables us to continually invest in improving and maintaining the Android operating system.

These agreements are optional and device makers can just take the open source Android operating system for free and build a phone without entering an agreement. Some companies, like Amazon, choose this route. Those who do include our services often preload numerous competing apps and app stores.

With this model, people have enormous choice when it comes to the search services they use on mobile devices. Android users download on average around 50 apps, and they’re free to download any app store they’d like. U.S. Android users downloaded over 14 billion apps from the Play Store in 2018, including general search engines, travel apps and e-commerce platforms hundreds of millions of times. It’s easy for people to remove Google Search or add a different search engine or widget on Android. Android also lets you easily set up rival voice assistants—like Alexa—that work with your connected devices.

Consumer choice

This isn’t the dial-up 1990s, when changing services was slow and difficult, and often required you to buy and install software with a CD-ROM. Today, with a couple of taps or clicks, you can easily choose your own search engine or download your choice of apps. In our Chrome web browser on mobile, for example, one tap into Settings and the first thing you see is an option to change your search engine—it’s front and center.

Many of the most popular apps—such as Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon and Snapchat—aren’t pre-loaded, and consumers downloaded a record 204 billion apps in 2019. And the data shows that people choose their preferred service. For example, when Yahoo! paid to be the default search engine in the Firefox browser, most Americans promptly switched their search engine to their first choice—Google.

Unlike other advertising, for ads on Google Search, a business pays only when someone clicks on or interacts with an ad. Plus, the business can decide how much it is prepared to pay—making search advertising far more affordable than other types of advertising. So rather than having to launch a big pricey campaign, advertisers can start with small budgets and scale as they grow. More than 36 percent of clicks to American advertisers come from overseas, helping them reach markets they might otherwise have missed.

We don’t show ads on the vast majority of Search queries. In fact, on average over the past four years, 80 percent of searches on Google haven’t had any ads at the top of search results. Further, only a small fraction of searches—less than 5 percent—currently have four top text ads. We only make money from a small fraction of queries, typically those with commercial intent, such as searches for things like “sneakers” or “toaster.” We face particularly robust competition for these types of queries. Amazon, Facebook, Bing, eBay, Snap, Twitter, Pinterest, Expedia, Kayak, Orbitz and many other companies all compete for commercial advertisements.

We invest significantly in our ads quality systems to continuously improve on our ability to show ads that are highly relevant to people, and helpful to what they’re searching for. Over time, this has led to better, more relevant ads and major improvements in the overall user experience. In fact, over the last four years, we’ve been able to reduce the rate of low-quality and irrelevant ads by 3x.

We compete with household names like Adobe, Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, News Corp, Oracle and Verizon, as well as lesser known but publicly traded leaders like Telaria, Rubicon Project, The Trade Desk, Index Exchange, MediaMath, OpenX and countless more.

Overall internet advertising prices have fallen by 40 percent over the last 10 years.

Over the same period, fees charged by advertising technology companies for the automated services they provide to advertisers and publishers declined as a percentage of spend, due to increased competition.

Even as online ad prices and fees have fallen, benefiting merchants and consumers, our tools have helped website owners and app developers make more money from ads. In 2018, we paid out more than $14 billion to the publishing partners in our ad network—up from $10 billion in 2015.

• Thousands of news publishers around the world use Google Ad Manager to run digital advertising on their websites and apps. On average, the top news publishers keep over 95 percent of the digital advertising revenue they generate when they use Google Ad Manager to show ads on their websites.
• Many marketers and publishers choose to use our advertising tools to buy and sell display ads online. And even when they use the full range of our tools, most of the money goes from advertisers to publishers. For example, in 2019, when marketers used Google Ads or Display & Video 360 to buy display ads on Google Ad Manager, publishers kept over 69 percent of the revenue generated.
• This means that we share a higher percentage of display ad revenue with publishers than the industry average. In other words, we charge less for our services than many of our competitors.

Publishers and advertisers typically use multiple competing platforms and solutions at the same time to buy and sell ad space. For example, the average large publisher uses six different platforms to sell ads on its site, and the average smaller publisher uses four.

People increasingly expect, and data privacy laws require, stricter control over ad tracking tools like cookies and ad identifiers. We are focused on meeting these expectations and requirements. We’re also creating privacy-protective solutions that enable others in the industry to operate and compete. For example, we’ve invested heavily in the expansion of Ads Data Hub to provide advertisers and agencies access to Google ads data in a way that preserves user privacy. In addition, we’ve introduced an open-source collaborative initiative called the Privacy Sandbox, working on alternatives to cookies that preserve privacy while enabling advertisers to run effective ads and measure their campaigns, and publishers to show relevant ads that help support quality online content.

Search Ads 360

Search Ads 360 helps advertisers manage their Google ad campaigns and run campaigns on other search engines like Microsoft Bing. (Other search engines don’t offer similar tools.) Our AdWords API also allows advertisers to export their Google ad campaigns to run them on Microsoft Bing. We invest significantly to make these products available even though we’re not required to.

Ad buying on YouTube

Like countless website publishers, we sell advertising space on YouTube through our advertising technology. Amazon, AT&T, Facebook and Yahoo all make ad space on their websites available through their respective advertising platforms, and so do TV networks.

We always sold the majority of our YouTube ad inventory through Google Ads and direct sales, and offered some leftover inventory via our ad exchange. Sales through that channel consistently represented less than 5 percent of YouTube ad buys. So we decided to invest in expanding TrueView, a skippable ad format, that third-party advertiser platforms couldn’t support at the time.

Competition in video ads is fierce, and Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Vimeo, TikTok and TV networks—all major players in this space—all make their inventory available through their own ad channels. That pro-competitive vertical integration improves the quality of ad services, benefiting advertisers and viewers.

There is a constant stream of innovative startups and investment in internet businesses has never been higher. In 2019, U.S. venture capital investment kept pace with record levels, totaling $136.5 billion across 10,777 deals.

The vast majority of our acquisitions are smaller technology companies that we’ve invested in to help them grow and reach consumers faster, at lower cost. YouTube, for example, had 67 employees and was struggling to survive amid existential copyright issues when we acquired the company in 2006. We invested heavily in the technology and tools for content protection, building it into a free video-sharing platform enjoyed by billions of people and offering business opportunities for creators.

Google is an incubator for startup founders. Former Google employees have built more than 2,000 startups—far more than we have acquired—including companies like Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter.

We have published more than 6,000 research papers, including more than 2,000 in the last three years, in areas such as machine learning, robotics, distributed systems, federated learning, differential privacy and cybersecurity.

Our open-source computing platforms are available to anyone to use, and build apps or businesses on, for free. This includes TensorFlow, our open-source machine learning platform; Chromium, our open-source browser software; and Android, our open-source operating system, which today powers more than 24,000 different models of smartphones and laptops—all for free.

For example, we have for years strongly supported comprehensive federal privacy legislation. But we’re not waiting, and we continue to make significant investments to enhance privacy across all of our products. We’ve also co-founded industry groups like the Data Transfer Project, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism and the Technology Coalition’s Project Protect.

We design our products with extraordinary care to provide access to a wide range of information, viewpoints and ideas. Our platforms have empowered an array of people and organizations from across the political spectrum, giving them a voice and new ways to reach their audiences. We build our products and enforce our policies in a fair and objective way, without regard to political ideology. Independent studies have similarly found no evidence of political bias in our products.