From children who search on YouTube to parents loyal to Google, every generation now gets its information differently. Beneath a market that looks static, everything has changed. And those who produce information and run businesses are being called on to rewrite their own rules.
My daughter is ten years old, and when she wants to know something she does not open Google — she opens YouTube. I am forty-three, and I still type into a search bar the way I was taught twenty years ago, though I have started directing my questions to artificial intelligence. My parents, finally, remain faithful to the television and to that white rectangle of Google that for them is synonymous with the whole idea of “the internet.” Three generations, three radically different ways of performing the same ancient act: looking for an answer.
This is not a private anecdote. It is a domestic-scale photograph of one of the most underestimated transformations of the decade. Information search is not simply migrating from one platform to another: it is fragmenting along the lines of age, format, and intent. And the most striking thing is that this fracture is happening beneath the surface of a market that, viewed from a distance, seems not to have moved an inch.
The monolith and the cracks
Google’s numbers still tell a story of near-total dominance. Globally, the Mountain View engine holds roughly 91% of the market, and in Italy its share approaches 95% — above the global average. The overall volume of searches, far from contracting, continues to grow at 2–3% a year. Anyone who reads only these figures will conclude, understandably, that nothing has changed.
But change the question — not “how many people use Google” but “what happens after they use it” — and the picture flips. Between 58% and 62% of Google searches today end with no click to an external site: the so-called zero-click search. And AI-generated answers, AI Overviews, now appear at the top of 48% of searches — growth of 58% in a single year. The informational demand has not diminished; it is increasingly being satisfied inside the platform itself, before the user ever reaches a site, an article, a source. The monolith holds; but the relationship between searchers and publishers has fractured at its core.
The sharpest break is the generational one. Moving from the youngest to the oldest, you cross through five nearly incompatible ways of relating to information.
Generation Alpha: the search engine is YouTube
For children of Generation Alpha — born from 2010 onward — the true search engine is YouTube. Among children aged two to twelve, 78% use it, ahead of streaming, video games, and TikTok. Half of them discover brands on YouTube before anywhere else, and by current estimates the platform’s consumption will surpass that of linear television among the under-12s this year. One detail that speaks louder than any analysis: 48% of these children already search by voice, speaking to their device. For them, the keyboard is not the starting point — it is one option among many.
Generation Z: Google and three parallel channels
Generation Z — born between 1997 and 2012 — embodies the most instructive paradox. They have not abandoned Google at all: 90% use it every week, and they are in fact the age group most likely to declare it their absolute preference. But they pair it with a constellation of channels activated by intent. Eighty-six percent search on TikTok every week — especially for fashion, beauty, food, and entertainment — with daily searches on the platform up 40% in a year. Fifty-eight percent of those under 30 use ChatGPT, a figure more than doubled from the 33% of 2023. And when they want a genuine opinion, many append the word “reddit” to their search, bypassing corporate content to reach real conversations between real people. This is not substitution — it is stratification: the right engine for each type of question.
Millennials: the hybrid profile
Millennials — my generation, born between 1981 and 1996 — are the hybrid profile par excellence. They remain anchored to Google, which 94% use weekly, but are in full transition: 53% say they now prefer AI tools to traditional search engines. This is the cohort that reports the highest professional competency in using AI — even more than Generation Z. One foot firmly in the old world, the other already in the new one.
Generation X: the skeptical verifier
Generation X — born between 1965 and 1980 — is the skeptical verifier. They distrust discovery through social media: only 12% consider TikTok effective as a research tool. They favor verifiable sources, reviews, and official sites, and show a more pronounced preference for desktop over younger generations. AI enters here too, but selectively — driven by convenience rather than enthusiasm.
Boomers: the traditional searcher
Finally, Boomers — born between 1946 and 1964, my parents’ generation. They are the traditional searchers, for whom Google and Bing remain the uncontested starting point. Only 20% use AI on a weekly basis, and 71% have never opened ChatGPT. Their distance from social media as a discovery channel is stark: just 5% of those over 65 visit TikTok daily, compared to roughly half of people in their twenties.
The cross-generational challenger
There is one force that cuts horizontally across all these generations: conversational AI. Unlike TikTok, which remains a strongly generational phenomenon, ChatGPT shows a surprisingly uniform adoption pattern: 14% of consumers say they rely on AI more than on Google, and this figure remains broadly stable across age groups. AI platforms appear to be capturing between 15% and 20% of the volume of informational searches.
A word of caution is warranted, however, before mistaking an acceleration for a completed revolution. The most careful measurements — those conducted by Semrush on cohorts of users — suggest that for now AI tends to expand the overall pool of searches more than it eats into Google’s share. And even among the youngest, the stated preference for TikTok “instead of” Google has actually fallen, from 8% in 2024 to 4% in 2026. The truth is less spectacular but more demanding: not one channel killing another, but an ecosystem multiplying.
When getting informed means watching a video
The terrain on which this fragmentation weighs most heavily is that of journalistic information. For the first time, in 2025, TikTok became the leading social news source in the United States among 18-to-29-year-olds — chosen by 43% of them, ahead of YouTube and Facebook. Five years ago, in 2020, that share stood at 9%. Over the same period, news has become progressively more video-based: a tendency that spans the entire news cycle, from format to credibility.
Reddit, for its part, is experiencing a second youth grounded in trust. In the era of algorithmically optimized content, the authentic experience of another human being has once again become scarce and sought-after. Weekly users of the platform’s internal search grew from roughly 60 to 80 million in a year; and Google, rather than resisting the trend, has leaned into it — signing a licensing agreement over Reddit content in 2024 and giving forums prominence in its results. It is a signal of the times: the voice of the people has itself become an authoritative source.
The Italian case
Italy is no exception, and for those working in information in Italy the data from the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025 merits careful reading. Globally, 44% of 18-to-24-year-olds identify social media and video platforms as their primary news source, compared to just 20% of those over 55 — a generational gap that redraws the audience of every news outlet. In Italy, AI chatbots remain marginal as a news source for the general public, hovering around 4%, but already reach 12% among the under-35s. TikTok is the fastest-growing social platform for news, at 17% — up four percentage points. And the consumption of news in video format on social media has risen from 52% in 2020 to 65% in 2025.
Two figures define the fragility of the market: trust in news stands at 36%, and only 6% of Italians pay for online information. An ecosystem marked by low trust and low monetization is, by definition, one in which source fragmentation accelerates rather than slows. The reader who neither trusts nor pays is a reader who disperses more easily among videos, automated responses, and community discussions.
From being indexed to being cited
What does all of this mean for those who publish content and run businesses? It means that the model on which digital visibility has rested for twenty years — ranking on Google, earning the click, bringing the user to your page — is losing its foundation. If six out of ten searches end without a click, and nearly one in two shows an AI-generated response, value no longer lies in being indexed — it lies in being cited. In being, that is, the source the algorithm chooses to surface when it answers on your behalf.
This is the shift that practitioners summarize in the acronym replacing the old SEO: GEO, Generative Engine Optimization — optimization for generative engines. The dashboard of metrics changes accordingly. Alongside traffic, a structurally declining indicator, new parameters are emerging: how many AI responses cite a brand or a publication, what share of those citations it captures relative to competitors, and how many people, ultimately, search for it directly by name. In a zero-click world, the click that truly counts is precisely that last one — the one born from reputation, not from ranking.
For publishers, the stakes are twofold. On one side, the challenge of being recognized and cited by AI systems — including through licensing agreements of the kind already defining the relationship between major platforms and content producers. On the other, the recovery of that trust premium that Reddit’s success demonstrates is still very much alive: in a landscape saturated with automation, the recognizable byline, the demonstrated expertise, and the authentic experience return to their value as competitive assets, not ornamental extras.
The new question
One might be tempted to tell this transformation as a war between platforms: Google versus TikTok, search engines versus AI, text versus video. That would be a misleading simplification. We are not moving from Google to another platform. We are moving from the logic of the click to the logic of visibility — a deeper change, because it touches not the tool, but the very way in which information is found, chosen, and believed.
The question companies and publications were asking until recently was: how do I rank on Google? The question of today — and even more of tomorrow — is different, and it sounds almost disquieting in its simplicity: what does AI say when someone asks about me? Those who answer this question in time, generation by generation, platform by platform, will not merely have defended their visibility. They will have understood, before everyone else, where the conversation has moved.
A necessary qualification: much of this data was gathered on samples of American users, and should be read as an indication of direction rather than an exact portrait of the Italian reader. I do not believe, however, that the Italian picture diverges significantly from this trajectory: Reuters Institute data on Italy points in the same direction, and the platforms we are talking about — Google, TikTok, YouTube, the major AI models — are global by definition.
What differs from one country to another is the timing. The direction, much less so.
Frequently asked questions
