If you’re typing google is how old into a search bar, you’re probably looking for a single number. A clean, easy birthday. But Google is kinda weird about its own age. Depending on who you ask—or which year you asked them—the answer actually changes. It’s not just about a calendar date; it’s about the messy reality of how a garage project became the center of the internet.
Honestly, the official answer is that Google celebrated its 27th birthday in September 2025. By the time 2026 rolls around, it’ll be hitting that 28-year milestone. But if you dig into the archives, the "birth" of Google is less of a single moment and more of a long, caffeinated blur between 1995 and 1998.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. Larry was 22. Sergey was 21. If you count from the moment they started working on "Backrub"—the original, much-uglier name for the search engine—Google is basically over 30 years old. But corporations don't count "conception." They count paperwork.
Why the official age of Google feels so confusing
Most people expect a company to have a fixed birthday. Like a human. But Google has actually celebrated its birthday on at least four different dates over the years. It’s a bit of a running joke in the tech world.
In the early 2000s, they celebrated on September 7th, which is when the company was officially incorporated in 1998. Then they shifted it to September 8th. For a while, they even used September 26th. Since 2006, however, they’ve stuck pretty firmly to September 27th. Why? Because that’s the day they published a doodle to celebrate an early record-breaking number of pages indexed. It wasn’t a legal milestone. It was a "we’re huge now" milestone.
The Stanford Years (1995-1997)
The seeds were planted way before the 1998 incorporation. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school, and Sergey Brin was the guy assigned to show him around. Legend has it they disagreed about almost everything during that first meeting.
By 1996, they were collaborating on a search engine called Backrub. It lived on Stanford’s servers for more than a year. It used "backlinks" to rank the importance of a website, a radical departure from the directory-style lists used by Yahoo! or AltaVista at the time. If you want to be pedantic, google is how old could be answered as "30" if you’re looking at the actual functional technology.
The Garage Era (1998)
The official "Age 0" starts in 1998. This is the year things got legal.
- August 1998: Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, writes a check for $100,000 to "Google Inc." The problem? Google Inc. didn't exist yet.
- September 4, 1998: They officially file for incorporation in California so they can actually cash the check.
- September 27, 1998: The date Google now chooses to celebrate as its formal birthday.
How Google’s age compares to other internet fossils
To understand the scale of Google’s dominance, you have to look at what else was happening when it was born. In 1998, the "Dancing Baby" GIF was the peak of internet humor. People were still using 56k dial-up modems that sounded like a robot screaming into a pillow.
Apple was just starting its comeback with the translucent Bondi Blue iMac. Amazon was barely a four-year-old company that mostly sold books. Facebook wouldn't exist for another six years. When you ask google is how old, you're looking at a survivor from the first Great Internet Explosion. Most of its peers from that era—Lycos, Excite, Ask Jeeves—are either dead or wearing the skin of their former selves as niche portals.
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Google didn't just survive. It ate the world.
The "Backrub" to Google transition: A timeline of growth
It’s hard to imagine now, but Google was once just a couple of guys borrowing hard drives from the Stanford computer science department. They literally built their first server racks out of Lego bricks because it was a cheap way to house the high-heat components.
- 1997: The domain https://www.google.com/search?q=google.com is registered on September 15. This is another candidate for its "actual" birthday.
- 1999: They outgrow the garage and move to an office in Palo Alto. They tried to sell the company to Excite for $750,000. Excite’s CEO turned them down. Imagine being that guy today.
- 2000: Google becomes the world’s largest search engine with its first billion-page index.
- 2004: The IPO. This changed everything. On August 19, Google went public at $85 a share.
If you bought $1,000 worth of stock at the IPO, you’d be sitting on a fortune today. But the age of the company also represents a shift in culture. The "Don't Be Evil" era of the early 2000s has evolved into the Alphabet Inc. era—a massive conglomerate that touches everything from self-driving cars (Waymo) to life extension (Calico).
Why knowing the age matters for SEO and Trust
In the world of search engine optimization, age is a signal. Not just for the company, but for the websites it crawls. Google trusts "authority."
There’s a concept in the SEO industry often called the "Sandbox." It’s an unconfirmed but widely observed phenomenon where new websites struggle to rank for competitive keywords for the first few months. Google, being nearly three decades old, values longevity. It knows that spam sites come and go, but institutions last. When we look at google is how old, we are looking at the most established gatekeeper in digital history.
The Alphabet Era: Is Google still "Google"?
In 2015, Google did something weird. It reorganized itself. Larry and Sergey created a parent company called Alphabet.
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Technically, Google became a subsidiary. This makes answering "how old is Google" even more annoying for lawyers. Does the clock reset? No. But it signaled that the "search engine" was no longer the only goal. Google is now a veteran. It’s the "old man" of the valley.
Younger generations are starting to use TikTok or Instagram for search. This is the first time in 27 years that Google has faced a legitimate threat to its primary function. They are leaning heavily into AI (Gemini) to stay relevant. An old dog trying to learn very expensive, very complex new tricks.
Common misconceptions about Google's start
People often think Google was the first search engine. It wasn't even close. Archie came out in 1990. WebCrawler and AltaVista were huge when Larry and Sergey were still in school.
What made Google different wasn't being first, but being smarter. Their PageRank algorithm treated the internet like an academic paper—the more people who "cited" (linked to) a page, the more important it was.
Another myth: They started in a dorm. While the research started in a dorm (and a computer lab), the company started in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. Susan later became the CEO of YouTube. The history of Google is basically a story of a small group of friends who ended up running the entire information economy.
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Actionable Insights: What to do with this info
Knowing Google’s age isn't just for trivia night. It helps you understand the trajectory of the web.
- Respect the "Old" Web: Google values historical data. If you have an old domain, don't let it expire. The age of a domain is a massive trust factor in 2026.
- Watch the Birthday Doodles: Every September 27, Google hides "Easter eggs" in its search results. These often hint at where the company is heading next (like AI integrations or new interface changes).
- Audit Your History: Just as Google has evolved from 1998 to now, your online presence should too. Old, thin content on your site from ten years ago can actually hurt your rankings today because Google's standards for "quality" have aged and matured.
- Understand the Cycle: Every 10 years, tech shifts. 1998 was the Portal era. 2008 was the Mobile era. 2018 was the Cloud/Data era. 2026 is the AI era. If you’re a business owner, align your content with how an aging, AI-focused Google reads the web.
Google is 27 years old, going on 28. It’s no longer a scrappy startup. It’s the infrastructure of modern life. Whether you love it or hate it, its history is the history of the internet itself. Keep an eye on that September 27th date—it’s usually when they drop their biggest updates.