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.
That’s the quiet cost of a brand becoming a verb in the first place. Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary both added “google,” lowercase, as a verb in 2006, cementing a shift that had already happened in practice. For a decade, there was effectively one way to look something up online, and the company’s name became shorthand for the act itself.
Google’s own trademark lawyers were reportedly uneasy about this, worried about a legal concept called genericide, in which a brand name becomes so synonymous with a category that courts stop protecting it—the fate that already overtook aspirin and the escalator.
A changing vernacular
Linguists say ChatGPT is already measurably influencing how humans write and speak, with AI-favored words like “delve,” “meticulous” and “adept” spreading into everyday conversation.
A team led by Stanford’s Carmela Zunino and Michael Bernstein, working with researchers who studied more than 100,000 Reddit posts and comments, found people picking up chatbot vocabulary in unscripted conversation, not just copy-pasted text.
And the words spread even to people who’d never used ChatGPT themselves. Hiromu Yakura, a postdoctoral researcher at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development, said he shifted his own vocabulary about a year after the chatbot’s release: “I realized I was using ‘delve’ more,” he said.
Researchers at Florida State University found a similar pattern across 22.1 million words of unscripted speech, with nearly three-quarters of the AI-associated words they tracked growing in frequency, some more than doubling.
Kids appear to be the leading edge of this shift, not just incidental beneficiaries of it. One 2022 study found that children raised in households using Alexa and Siri started addressing humans with the same curt, command-style phrasing they used with voice assistants — “Hey, do X” — a pattern researchers flagged years before ChatGPT existed. That’s the same generation now swapping “Google it” for “search it up.”