Google stock wraps best year since 2009 as AI excites Wall Street

After a tough start to the year, Google closed out 2025 with its strongest performance — from Wall Street’s perspective — since 2009, when the company’s shares doubled coming out of the financial crisis.

Alphabet’s stock popped 65% for the year, slightly ahead of its gains in 2021. The shares hit their 2025 low in April, as President Donald Trump was threatening massive tariffs on trading partners, but they’ve since jumped over 100%.

Among the eight tech companies valued at over $1 trillion, Alphabet was by far the biggest gainer. The next sharpest rallies came from chipmakers Broadcom and Nvidia, which gained 49% and 39%, respectively.

Getting to this point required Google to stare down the skeptics, who questioned whether the search giant could maintain its dominance in the artificial intelligence era. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora services capturing an increasing amount of consumer engagement and concerns swirling around the future of online advertising in a world of AI chatbots and agents, Google’s business model was viewed as a target for major disruption.

Alphabet’s 18% plunge in the first quarter was its worst period for the stock since mid-2022.

But the mood started to improve in the second quarter. In April, the company promoted 16-year company veteran Josh Woodward to run the Gemini app, Google’s answer to ChatGPT.

In August, Woodward’s group debuted image generator Nano Banana, a Gemini feature that lets users turn to AI to generate images. The feature went viral at launch when people used it to blend multiple photos together to create personal digitized figurines. By the end of the following month, the Gemini app surpassed 5 billion images and dethroned OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the top of Apple’s App Store. 

Google’s AI talent pool deepened over the summer, when the company announced an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of AI coding startup Windsurf, along with other senior research and development employees from the high-profile startup that had previously been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition. That deal fell apart, and Google ended up agreeing to pay $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation to snag Windsurf’s top engineers.

Despite losing its antitrust case last year, as Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in internet search, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in September against the most severe consequences that were proposed by the Justice Department.

Google would not have to divest Chrome and could still make payments to companies to preload products, meaning it could continue paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search…