They don't go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.
In mid-2022, a senior Google executive stood before an industry audience and acknowledged what internal data had already confirmed: nearly four in ten young Americans now turn to TikTok or Instagram when they want to discover a restaurant, a place, or an experience — bypassing the search engine and maps application that Google spent decades making indispensable. It is a quiet but consequential reckoning, one that reveals how deeply a generation shaped by visual, scrolling immersion has drifted from the keyword-and-blue-link logic that built one of the most powerful companies in human history. The question Google now faces is not merely one of product design, but of whether an institution built to answer questions can remain relevant to people who no longer think in questions at all.
- Google's own internal research exposed a striking vulnerability: 40% of 18-to-24-year-olds are skipping Google entirely and opening TikTok or Instagram when they want to find somewhere to eat or explore.
- The disruption cuts to the core — every restaurant listing, every mapped business, every discovery tool Google carefully built is being quietly bypassed by users who were never trained to think in search queries.
- Younger users don't type; they scroll, watch, and expect to stumble into discovery through visual richness, a fundamentally different cognitive model that Google's products were never designed to serve.
- Google is fighting back by indexing social video directly into search results, deploying AI to analyze video segments at a granular level, and adding augmented reality layers to Maps to replace the paper-map logic younger users never learned.
- But the 40% figure signals the shift is already well advanced — not a future threat but a present reality — leaving Google in a race against its own legacy assumptions.
In July 2022, Prabhakar Raghavan, the Google senior vice president overseeing Knowledge & Information, made an unusually candid admission at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference: internal research showed that roughly 40 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 were turning to TikTok or Instagram — not Google Search or Maps — when looking for a place to eat or something to discover. It was a rare moment of public honesty from a company confronting a generational fault line running through its core business.
Google had built its empire on a simple premise: people type keywords, Google returns ranked results. Maps extended that logic to physical space. But the generation now coming of age has never known a world without social video platforms, and they don't think in keywords. They scroll. They watch. They expect discovery to arrive through visual immersion, not textual precision. As Raghavan noted, the queries younger users ask — when they ask at all — are completely different from the ones Google was designed to answer.
The implications were significant. Every local listing Google had organized, every discovery feature it had built into Maps, was being bypassed by users who simply didn't think of Google as their first stop. Raghavan also pointed out that Maps itself was designed around the logic of a paper map — an object younger users had never encountered and held no mental model for.
Google's response was already in motion. The company began indexing TikTok and Instagram videos directly into search results, and deployed AI capable of analyzing video at the segment level — so a search could land a user at the precise moment in a video where the relevant information appeared. Maps was gaining augmented reality features and immersive 3D views to feel less like a digitized relic. Voice search, already accounting for 30 percent of queries in some countries, pointed toward a future of visual search — users querying the world through what their cameras see.
Yet whether Google could move quickly enough remained an open question. The 40 percent figure was not a warning about the future; it described the present. For the first time, Google's most essential products were no longer the default for a meaningful share of internet users — and the company that taught the world to search now had to reckon with a generation that never learned to.
Prabhakar Raghavan, the senior vice president who oversees Google's Knowledge & Information division, stood before an audience at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference in mid-July 2022 and delivered an uncomfortable truth about his own company. When young people want to find a place to eat, they are no longer reaching for Google Maps or typing a search query into Google's search engine. Instead, nearly four in ten of them—40 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24, according to internal Google research—are opening TikTok or Instagram.
The admission marked a rare moment of candor from a tech giant confronting a fundamental shift in how the internet's youngest users navigate the world. Google had long dominated the discovery business. The company built its empire on the premise that people would type keywords into a search box and receive a ranked list of results. Maps extended that logic to physical space. But the users coming of age now have never known a world without social video platforms, and they don't think in keywords. They think in images, in videos, in the immersive visual experiences that TikTok and Instagram have trained them to expect.
Raghavan explained that these younger users approached discovery entirely differently than the generations that built Google's business model. They didn't ask the kinds of questions Google was designed to answer. They didn't type. They scrolled. They watched. They expected to stumble upon information through visual richness rather than textual precision. "The queries they ask are completely different," Raghavan said. The data came from a survey of U.S. users in that 18-to-24 age bracket, Google confirmed, though the company had not yet made the findings public.
The implications rippled through Google's core business. Every restaurant listing Google had painstakingly organized, every local business it had indexed, every discovery tool it had built into Maps—all of it was being bypassed by users who simply didn't think of Google as their first stop anymore. The company had spent years teaching the world to search. Now it had to contend with a generation that had never learned to think that way.
Google's response was already underway, though it revealed just how much work lay ahead. The company had begun indexing TikTok and Instagram videos directly into search results, a tacit acknowledgment that if users were going to those platforms first, Google needed to meet them there. Search for any trending topic followed by "TikTok" and Google would return rows of videos before traditional webpages appeared. The company was also deploying artificial intelligence to understand video content at a granular level—not just identifying that a video existed, but analyzing its segments so that a user searching "how to change a tire" could jump directly to the moment when the video explained how to loosen the lug nuts.
But Raghavan also signaled that Google understood the deeper problem: its products themselves were built on assumptions that no longer held. Google Maps, he noted, was designed to look like a paper map that had been shrunk and placed on a phone. Young people had never seen a paper map. They had no mental model for what that interface was supposed to represent. Google was beginning to address this by adding augmented reality features that would help users position themselves in physical space without relying on a blue dot and directional arrows. The company had also announced new 3D modes and immersive views at its developer conference, moves designed to make Maps feel less like a digitized relic and more like something native to how younger users actually wanted to experience the world.
Search itself was evolving along similar lines. Raghavan traced the history: first came keyword queries and blue links, then natural language understanding, then voice search, which now accounted for 30 percent of all queries in some countries. The next frontier, he suggested, was visual search—users holding up their phones, or perhaps wearing augmented reality glasses, and searching based on what they saw in front of them. But getting there required "altogether new technology underpinnings," as Raghavan put it. The company was still on that journey, still learning how to give video the same depth of analysis it had long applied to text.
What remained unresolved was whether Google could move fast enough. The 40 percent figure was striking precisely because it suggested the shift was already well underway, not some distant threat on the horizon. For the first time in its history, Google's core products—the search engine and the maps application that had made the company indispensable—were no longer the default first stop for a significant portion of internet users. The company had built an empire on being the answer to every question. Now it had to figure out how to remain relevant to people who weren't asking questions at all.
Notable Quotes
The queries they ask are completely different. These users don't tend to type in keywords, but rather look to discover content in new, more immersive ways.— Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President, Google Knowledge & Information
We have to conjure up completely new expectations and that takes altogether new technology underpinnings.— Prabhakar Raghavan
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
When Raghavan said 40 percent of young people use TikTok or Instagram instead of Google Maps for finding restaurants, did he seem concerned, or was this presented as just another data point?
There was something almost matter-of-fact about how he mentioned it—like he was sharing an observation from internal research rather than sounding an alarm. But the fact that he brought it up at all, publicly, suggests Google knows this is serious. Companies don't usually volunteer their vulnerabilities.
The thing that strikes me is that this isn't about YouTube, which is also Google-owned. This is about Google's core business—Search and Maps—being displaced. How does that change the threat profile?
It's existential in a different way. YouTube losing share to TikTok is one thing. But if people stop using Google Search as their first stop for discovery, the entire advertising model that funds the company starts to crack. You can't sell ads against queries that never happen.
Raghavan talked about younger users wanting "visually rich" experiences. But isn't that just a preference? Can't Google just add more visuals to Search and Maps?
That's what Google is trying to do with AR and 3D views. But the deeper problem is cultural. These users grew up with TikTok and Instagram. They think in those platforms' logic—algorithmic feeds, video-first, discovery through scrolling. Google's entire architecture is built on the opposite: you ask a question, you get an answer. You can't just paint over that difference with better graphics.
So Google is essentially playing catch-up to a way of thinking about the internet that it didn't invent?
Exactly. And the users who think that way are already gone. Google can try to index TikTok videos and build AR features, but it's still trying to make its old products work for a new mindset. The question is whether that's fast enough, or whether Google has already lost this generation as its primary users.