People no longer google: Strong brand loyalty diluted – Google reacts with AI focus (Opinion)

Die Google Web Search has been on the market for over two and a half decades and has been the dominant search engine for most of that time. That’s not going to change any time soon, but usage habits may be changing and shrinking the market. We’ve already reported that the younger generation is no longer Googling – but what does that mean for the company?

Google has dominated the search engine market for over two decades and chances are that it will continue to do so for years to come – possibly until the end of the classic search engine as such. Just a few days ago it was announced that Generation Z no longer googles, but instead searches for information on the Internet. In most cases you will still end up on Google, but the natural connection between the activity and the product of Google Inc. seems to have been lost.

It is difficult to say whether this is a problem for Google or not. It is well known that at the beginning of the millennium Google was rather unhappy about the development and spread of the verb “google”. Marketing could not have been better, but in the long term this could have caused problems with trademark protection – which never happened. The concerns at the time no longer play a role today, but the marketing effect is of course lost.

Because people only googled on Google, everything else was/is unthinkable. Nobody googles on Bing. Nobody googles on ChatGPT or on social networks. You can google (=Google) or search (=everyone else), which underlined the outstanding position of the search engine on many levels. But if you only search today, Google is just one of many options.