“Google it” May Not Be the Only Game in Town Anymore

For most of us, “Google it” is practically muscle memory. Forget an actor’s name? Google it. Need a recipe for baked feta pasta? Google it. Want to prove your friend wrong in a bar argument? Google it—loudly.

It’s fast, familiar, and still incredibly effective.

But lately, something else has been creeping into the way we look for answers—something quieter, less reflexive, and a little more curious. We’re not just searching for facts anymore. We’re looking for insight. We’re looking for synthesis. And increasingly, we’re starting those searches with a different phrase: “I asked Chat.”

Now, this isn’t some mass exodus. Google is still the giant. But when you zoom in on behavior—not just clicks, but questions—something more nuanced is happening.

People are still Googling for the basics: store hours, train times, how to get marinara out of a white shirt. But when the questions get fuzzier—more strategic, more layered, more “what do I do about this?”—a new habit is emerging.

People are asking AI.

Not because it’s faster. Not because it’s cooler. But because it talks back.

Think about the difference between searching for “industry trends 2025” and asking, “What trends should I be paying attention to as a small consumer brand in a crowded market?” One gives you a list of articles. The other gives you a starting point for thinking.

And when the stakes are high—when someone’s trying to size up competitors, evaluate positioning, or plan a product launch—they don’t want ten links. They want clarity.

That’s where AI has crept in—not as a replacement for search, but as a co-pilot for more complex thinking.

Shane Tepper, an expert in AI-native strategy and LLM optimization, sees this shift not as a platform war, but as a deeper behavioral evolution.

“The future isn’t AI vs. Google—it’s AI plus Google plus social plus everything else. Your brand needs to show up where influence happens, not just where volume lives. That’s why I focus on LLMO: because in high-stakes moments, being invisible in AI isn’t a small problem—it’s a costly one.”

It’s a useful distinction. Search is where we go when we know what we’re looking for. AI is where we go when we’re still figuring it out.

And that’s probably the biggest change underway—not in the tools themselves, but in us. We’re getting more comfortable with ambiguity. We’re getting more conversational. We’re starting to ask bigger, weirder, more open-ended questions—and expecting the tools to meet us there.

This doesn’t mean Google is going anywhere. But it might mean the kinds of questions that define our work, shape our strategy, or shift our perspective are no longer being asked in a search bar.

They’re being typed into a prompt window.

So what does that mean for how we think? For how we decide? For who gets to be part of the answer?

It means we’re building new habits. And habits, once formed, are sticky. The more we use AI for high-context problem solving, the more we expect our answers to be layered, dynamic, and nuanced. The more we trust tools that understand us, not just index the web.

This shift isn’t loud. It’s not viral. It’s not replacing “Google it” in everyday language—at least not yet. But it’s happening in the quieter corners of how people work, plan, and decide.

We’re not just Googling anymore. We’re probing. We’re chatting. We’re asking.

And in those moments, influence isn’t measured by page rank. It’s measured by whether your ideas show up in the conversation.

The search bar may still be the front door to the internet. But increasingly, people are heading around back—to the place where the real thinking gets done.