Kids don’t ‘Google it’ anymore. AI chatbots taught them to ‘search it up’ instead

For most of the past two decades, “Google it” was the automatic answer to almost any question. Ask Gen Z or Gen Alpha the same question now, and the reply is more likely to be “search it up” — a phrase that does the same job without naming a company at all.

The swap looks small, but it lines up with a real change in behavior, and a growing body of research on how AI reshapes language. Kids who grew up with Siri, then ChatGPT, then Gemini, don’t necessarily go to a search engine first when they want an answer. They ask a chatbot, or they ask an app like TikTok, or they ask a voice assistant. “Search it up” works as an instruction because it’s platform-agnostic: it tells someone to go find the answer, without specifying where. “Google it” never had that flexibility.

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