Americans are turning to digital solutions in times of economic uncertainty.
Google is helping.
Letter
We are proud of the role that Google’s tools and services have played in supporting communities across the U.S. as they weather uncertainty in the economy, including increasing costs and inflation.
Small business owners know all too well that “expecting the unexpected” comes with the territory. But the past few years have been uniquely challenging. We are proud of the role that Google’s tools and services have played in supporting communities across the U.S. as they weather uncertainty in the economy, including increasing costs and inflation.
Google’s free and low-cost tools help many small business owners adapt by reaching more customers, learning new skills, and growing their businesses.
Google’s free and low-cost tools help many small business owners adapt by reaching more customers, learning new skills, and growing their businesses. In 2022, Google Search, Google Play, Google Cloud, YouTube and Google advertising tools helped provide $701 billion of economic activity for millions of American businesses, nonprofits, publishers, creators and developers.
Businesses like Palmetto Outdoor Spaces in South Carolina, owned by Charlotte Groce, use Google’s free tools to grow. In fact, 80% of Palmetto’s leads come from their Google Business Profile. Free training resources from the Grow with Google YouTube channel help Charlotte use Google Analytics to increase quality leads as she expands the indoor shading part of her business, and help her get smarter about managing Palmetto’s own YouTube channel.
In addition to supporting businesses with free and low-cost products, we are committed to helping workers and job seekers upskill for the future. Since 2017, Grow with Google has trained 10 million Americans – small business owners included – in digital skills, including our 150,000 Career Certificate graduates who now have job-ready skills in data analytics, digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, project management and more.
Among the certificate graduates is Alex Corral, who left college due to financial challenges. While working at his family’s restaurant, he suffered an injury on the job. Looking for a change, he enrolled in the Google IT Support Certificate. Earning his certificate gave him the confidence to apply for IT jobs. He landed a position as an information security analyst at a software company, where he has been working for the past two years.
In this report, you’ll meet other businesses, creators, startups, and learners from across the U.S. that are turning to digital tools to create new growth opportunities. We are inspired by their resilience and are committed to supporting them as they reach their goals.
Investing in local communities
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114,000+ Google employees
America is our home. Google employed over 114,000 people full time throughout the U.S. at the end of 2022. We’re proud to have offices and data centers in 26 states and committed to being good neighbors in the cities we call home.
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$478 million in philanthropic giving
In 2022, Google and Google.org gave $478 million in philanthropic giving (including employee and matching donations) and our employees volunteered 357,000 hours.
Our commitments to drive economic opportunity
Google is committed to driving economic opportunity for Americans, and we continue to support people with diverse backgrounds and circumstances. We help people, regardless of experience or degree status, access in-demand jobs and expand opportunities for them to learn new skills. We’ve invested in racial equity and social justice organizations, and funded new digital job skilling initiatives that support underserved small business owners, creators and startup founders.
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Supporting business growth
$2.8 billion
spent with diverse-owned suppliers
In 2022, Google spent $2.8 billion with diverse-owned suppliers, exceeding our public commitment of $2.5 billion. We also expanded our program beyond the U.S. to include suppliers from historically underrepresented groups around the world.
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Supporting business growth
160,000+
small business owners trained
Grow with Google Digital Coaches offer free, hands-on training and coaching to Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other diverse small business owners in 18 states. Since launch, Digital Coaches have trained over 160,000 business leaders through 2,700+ workshops.
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Supporting business growth
$100+ million
toward supporting Black, Latino and Indigenous communities
Google.org grants helped organizations prepare the Black, Latino and Indigenous communities for jobs in the digital economy and fund the growth of their small businesses.
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Supporting business growth
$20 million
deployed through Black and Latino Founders Funds
Google for Startups supports inspiring, diverse founders across the U.S. with capital, community and products to help them grow. Since 2020, Google for Startups has provided $20 million in cash awards and support through its Black and Latino Founders Funds. This has created a powerful halo effect by helping founders raise over $190 million in additional venture capital.
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Providing learners with skilling opportunities
200,000+
women participated in Black Women Lead workshops
Black Women Lead offers free digital skills workshops that can help participants find a job, grow their career, and build their leadership skills.
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Providing learners with skilling opportunities
17+ million
students trained in computer science to date
Google is helping address inequities in computer science education by offering no-cost products and programs, like CS First and Code Next, to students across the U.S. To date, Google has invested over $240 million toward computer science skilling including Google.org grants to organizations like National 4H Council and Hidden Genius Project.
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Preparing job seekers for the workforce
150,000+
Google Career Certificate graduates in the U.S.
Google Career Certificates help people develop job-ready skills in high-growth fields like UX design, data analytics, project management and more in three to six months. After completing the program, graduates can connect with over 150 top employers. Within six months of completion, 75% of program graduates report a positive career outcome, such as a promotion, raise or new job.3 Educational institutions in all 50 states, including over 400 universities, community colleges and career and technical education high schools, have incorporated Google Career Certificates to help people begin promising careers in growing fields.
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Preparing job seekers for the workforce
300,000
job seekers placed into new jobs with salary increases
Through Google’s skilling programs and Google.org supported organizations like Goodwill Industries International, over 300,000 Americans have been placed into new jobs. On average, 47% of those placed are women and 70% come from minority backgrounds.
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Preparing job seekers for the workforce
$8 million
in additional support for justice-impacted communities
Since 2015, Google has supported many aspects of criminal justice reform with over $48 million in grant funding and 50,000 pro-bono volunteer hours. In 2022, we committed more than $8 million in new funding to support job seekers impacted by the justice system with digital skills training and automatic record clearance.
Cybersecurity advancements
We believe our products and services are only as helpful as they are secure. At Google, we are more focused than ever on protecting people, organizations, businesses and governments by sharing our expertise, empowering society to address ever-evolving cyber risks and continuously working to advance the state of the art in cybersecurity to build a safer world for everyone. Here are some of our key highlights from 2022:
Protecting people, businesses and governments
Security is the cornerstone of our product strategy. That’s why all our products have built-in protections that make them secure by default.
Protected high-risk individuals from targeted attacks ahead of the 2022 U.S. elections
Given the increase of threats to high-risk users, we doubled down on our commitment to provide the strongest security products and tools to those who need them most, like journalists and political campaigns.
To help people stay safe online ahead of the 2022 U.S. elections, we expanded our partnership with Defending Digital Campaigns to contribute more than 19,000 security keys to over 300 campaigns and party organizations across the country.
Our Campaign Security Project completed more than 50 training sessions for over 5,500 election stakeholders, and conducted 45 group and individual training sessions for more than 2,900 election workers. In addition, we’ve already trained many newly elected officials on how to use our products and services.
Online safety education in partnership with a non-profit organization
We partnered with Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational organization, to launch free, online lessons to help teach people how to stay safe online. We contributed $5 million to Khan Academy toward accessible, easy-to-understand online safety content for their 18 million monthly users around the world. The lessons feature Khan Academy founder, Sal Khan, and Google security experts giving actionable tips to help you keep your online accounts secure, browse the web safely, detect phishing attempts and more. Whether you’re a professional, parent, grandparent or student, Google and Khan Academy's internet safety course will help everyone stay safer – even as new security risks emerge online.
Empowering society to address evolving cybersecurity risks
We empower societies to unlock the potential of open source and share our knowledge and expertise transparently with the industry to keep ecosystems safer.
Continued our progress toward securing the foundation for software development
In May 2022, we announced the Open Source Security Upstream Team. Their focused attention allowed for a number of advancements in 2022, including making direct security improvements to more than 50 of the most critical projects underpinning the open internet. As part of the newly launched Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program, we disbursed $132,000 in rewards to date for 55 reports of open source vulnerabilities that could have otherwise been exploited by malicious actors. We also announced Sigstore GA to cryptographically sign artifacts from 9,000+ GitHub projects, reducing opportunities for compromise throughout the software supply chain.
Supported cybersecurity startups
Google supported diverse cybersecurity startups which are building technology to help keep families and businesses safe, such as Cyber Popup in Illinois and Securily in Florida, through our Black and Latino Founders Funds. Founders receive up to $150,000 cash awards, $100,000 in Google Cloud credits, and hands-on support from Google employees to help founders grow their cybersecurity businesses.
Joined hands with Mandiant
In September 2022, we completed our acquisition of Mandiant, a leader in dynamic cyber defense, threat intelligence and incident response services. Combining Google Cloud’s existing security portfolio with Mandiant’s leading cyber threat intelligence will allow us to deliver a security operations suite to help organizations globally stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle.
Advancing future technologies
We want to protect communities from the next generation of cyberthreats. Building on our AI expertise, we’re designing the next wave of architectures to push the boundaries of security innovation.
Continuously expanding the frontiers of security innovation: Post Quantum Cryptography
We remain future focused and continue to develop next-generation cryptographic systems that help safeguard against the breaking of public-key cryptosystems and compromising digital communications. The National Institute of Standards and Technology selected a submission with Google’s involvement (SPHINCS+) for standardization in 2022.
As we put our security knowledge into practice, we will continue to partner with governments, businesses and users to help protect their safety, usher in a new era in cybersecurity and bring immense societal benefit to current and future generations. Visit g.co/safety/cyber to learn more.