Gen Z and Gen Alpha have swapped ‘Google it' for ‘search it up,' a platform-agnostic phrase that fits a generation asking a chatbot, TikTok, or a voice assistant rather than a search engine, according to Catherina Gioino at Fortune. Google spent two decades as the default verb for looking something up, entering Merriam-Webster and the OED in lowercase in 2006, and its trademark lawyers were reportedly uneasy about genericide, the fate of aspirin and escalator. A Stanford-led team studying more than 100,000 Reddit posts found people picking up chatbot vocabulary in unscripted conversation, and Florida State researchers found most AI-associated words they tracked across 22.1 million words of speech rising in frequency.
