Google's Birthday 2026: Why September 27 and How Old Is Google?

Google celebrates its birthday on September 27 every year, and has done so since 2006. In 2026 it falls on a Sunday, and Google marked it with a birthday Doodle on its homepage. The date is a convention, not the day the company was legally created: Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998. Sources: Android Authority, Wikipedia.

Google turns 28 in 2026. The company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, so it reached 28 years on September 4, 2026, and celebrates the milestone publicly on September 27. If you count from the domain name google.com, registered on September 15, 1997, the brand is a year older. Sources: Wikipedia, NBC News.

Google has never given an official reason. Its own explanation, quoted by ABC News, is that the date "has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake". A popular theory links September 27 to a record number of pages indexed by the search engine, but Google has not confirmed it. What is documented: after using September 8 (2003), September 7 (2004) and September 26 (2005), Google has used September 27 every year since 2006. Sources: ABC News, Android Authority, NBC News.

Google was formally incorporated on September 4, 1998, in California. Its roots go back further: Larry Page and Sergey Brin started a Stanford research project called BackRub in 1996, and the google.com domain was registered on September 15, 1997. Each of those dates has a claim to being the "real" birthday, which is why the celebration date looks arbitrary. Sources: Wikipedia, NBC News.

For its 28th birthday, Google's homepage shows a nostalgic, retro take on its logo: chunky 3D-style letters in red, green, blue and yellow, according to LatestLY and Goodreturns. The Doodle was reported live in the US, India, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Australia and other countries. It continues the theme of 2025, when the 27th birthday Doodle brought back Google's first logo from 1998. Sources: LatestLY, Goodreturns, Google Doodles.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who met as PhD students at Stanford University in 1995. Their search engine ranked pages by the links pointing to them, the idea behind PageRank. Both stepped back from executive roles in 2019, and Sundar Pichai now runs Google and its parent company Alphabet. Sources: Wikipedia.

Google was incorporated in a rented garage in Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki, a friend of the founders. Wojcicki later joined Google as one of its first employees and went on to run YouTube from 2014 to 2023. The company then moved to Palo Alto and later to the Googleplex in Mountain View, still its headquarters. Sources: Wikipedia.

The name comes from a misspelling of googol, the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The founders picked it to reflect their goal of organizing a huge amount of information on the web. Sources: Wikipedia.

Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote a $100,000 check in August 1998. It was made out to "Google Inc.", a company that did not legally exist yet, which is one of the reasons Page and Brin incorporated a few weeks later, on September 4, 1998. Sources: Wikipedia.

Not every year. The most famous one was the 19th birthday in 2017, when the Doodle opened a surprise spinner that sent you to one of Google's classic Doodle games, from Pac-Man to a new Snake game. Coverage of the 2026 Doodle describes a retro logo rather than a game. Sources: Fortune, LatestLY.

Key dates: the first Doodle (Burning Man, August 1998), Gmail (April 1, 2004), the stock market debut (August 2004), Google Maps (2005), the purchase of Android (2005) and of YouTube for $1.65 billion (2006), the Chrome browser (2008), the first Android phone (2008), the creation of Alphabet (2015) and the Gemini AI models (2023). Sources: Wikipedia, Fortune.