Younger audiences say "search it up", not "Google it"

What happened?

Fortune reports that Gen Z and Gen Alpha increasingly say "search it up" where older generations said "Google it". The new phrase is platform agnostic: it tells someone to find an answer without naming where. Fortune ties the wording to how these groups look things up, reaching for a chatbot, a voice assistant, or an app like TikTok rather than defaulting to a search engine. The language side has research behind it: a Max Planck-led analysis of hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos and podcast episodes found chatbot-favored words spreading into unscripted human speech after ChatGPT launched.

Why does it matter?

The vocabulary is a symptom, and the condition is what affects you: for the youngest people in your audience, there is no single front door to information anymore. If your visibility thinking still assumes everyone starts at Google, your plan quietly excludes the generation now entering college, first jobs, and volunteering age. The questions your organization should be the answer to are increasingly asked in chatbots and voice assistants, where nobody sees a list of links, only whatever answer comes back.

Should I do anything?

Pick the one question a younger member of your audience is most likely to ask about your topic, then ask it in a chatbot phrased the way they would say it out loud, casually and without your organization name in it. Note whether you are mentioned or cited at all. That single check tells you whether the platform agnostic generation can find you. If the answer is no, our visibility audit guide walks you through the full version of this exercise when you have an afternoon.

Learn more

• Fortune: kids say "search it up" now
• Scientific American: ChatGPT is changing how we speak
• The spoken-language study (arXiv preprint)
• Our guide: conduct an AI visibility audit