Search it up reflects how AI chatbots changed kids’ online habits

“Search it up” is gaining ground with young people as AI chatbots and other apps change how they look for answers, Fortune reported. The shift matters because it shows Google’s name no longer carries the same automatic role in online search for Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

For much of the internet era, “Google it” served as a default instruction for finding information online. Fortune reported that younger users who grew up with Siri, ChatGPT and Gemini are more likely to treat search as an activity that can happen across several tools, including chatbots, TikTok and voice assistants.

The newer phrase does not point to one company. It tells someone to find the answer without saying whether that answer should come from a search engine, a social app or an AI assistant.

Why are kids saying “search it up”?

Fortune linked the phrase to a broader change in habits: children and teenagers now have more than one obvious place to ask questions. A platform-neutral command fits a world where answers may come from Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Siri, Alexa or TikTok.

The language change also follows a long-running pattern in which technology alters everyday speech. Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary added “google” as a lowercase verb in 2006, after the company’s name had already become shorthand for looking something up online.

That status carried a trademark risk, Fortune noted. Google’s lawyers were reportedly concerned about genericide, a legal term for a brand name becoming so widely used for a category that it can lose trademark protection. Fortune cited aspirin and escalator as examples of names that met that fate.

What research shows about AI and language

Several studies cited by Fortune suggest AI tools are already affecting how people write and speak. Researchers led by Stanford’s Carmela Zunino and Michael Bernstein studied more than 100,000 Reddit posts and comments and found that people adopted chatbot-style vocabulary in ordinary conversation, not only in copied AI text.

Hiromu Yakura, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, told Scientific American that his own word choice changed after ChatGPT’s release. He said he noticed he was using “delve” more often.

Florida State University researchers found a similar trend in 22.1 million words of unscripted speech, according to Newsweek. Nearly three-quarters of the AI-linked words they tracked became more common, with some more than doubling in frequency.

Children may be especially exposed to these shifts because they learn language while using digital assistants. Fortune cited a 2022 study that found children in homes with Alexa and Siri sometimes used the same short command style with people that they used with voice assistants, such as “Hey, do X.”

That finding came before ChatGPT reached the public. Fortune reported that the same generation is now helping move everyday search language away from a company-specific verb and toward the broader instruction to “search it up.”

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.