Gen Z May Be Pulling Away From Using TikTok Over Google Search

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While a growing number of U.S. consumers are using TikTok for search, a new survey suggests the popular social network may not be as strong of a challenger to Google as previously believed. 

A new survey from Adobe Express found that the number of people using TikTok for search has grown compared to a 2024 survey from the same company. However, the study found that fewer young users say they prefer TikTok to Google’s search engine. 

The Study

The report comes from an Adobe Express survey published earlier this month and conducted in January 2026. It surveyed over 800 consumers and 200 small businesses in the U.S. about their search habits across various platforms including Google, TikTok, and ChatGPT. 

It found that 49% of consumers report using TikTok as a search engine, an 8 point increase from 2024. However, the most notable findings were among Gen Z users. 

Gen Z and TikTok as a Search Engine

While much has been made about the number of Gen Z users favoring TikTok over Google, the study shows that number is actually falling. 

Among Gen Z users who were surveyed, those who said they were more likely to turn to TikTok for a search over Google fell from 8% in 2024 to 4% in 2026. 

This isn’t to say Gen Z is using TikTok less for search, though. In fact, 65% of Gen Z users said they use TikTok as a search engine, and 25% said they found it effective for finding information. It’s just that they don’t necessarily prefer TikTok’s search tools over Google’s. 

Instead, it seems that Gen Z is adopting a multiplatform approach to search – using the platform they feel is best or most convenient for specific searches. 

ChatGPT Shows Growth as a Search Engine

While the number of people who prefer TikTok for search over Google fell, the survey suggests more users of every age group are turning to ChatGPT for search over Google. 

According to the survey, 14% of users say they are more likely to use ChatGPT for search than Google. This was true even when broken down by age group, with 12% of Gen Z, 15% of millennials, 15% of Gen Z, and 14% of baby boomers. 

What This Means

When a significant number of younger users started reporting using TikTok over Google, it caught the notice of many brands and marketers. However, it appears the situation isn’t as simple as “TikTok will be the next big search engine”. Instead, it appears that users are using a variety of search platforms, with ChatGPT quickly growing as a significant player in search. 

It is unclear whether the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations or changes to the platform contributed to the decrease in those who favor the platform. 

For brands looking to supplement their search marketing in the face of falling organic search traffic from Google, the answer seems to be investing in multiple platforms and ensuring they are getting picked up by AI tools – especially ChatGPT. That said, it will still likely be quite some time before any single platform dethrones Google as the biggest search engine.

For more, read the full report from Adobe Express here.

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Google Experts Share The Two Most Common Crawling Issues

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Crawling and indexing issues are one of the most damaging SEO issues a site can have. Not only do they hurt your rankings, making your business and products less visible in search results. These types of issues can completely prevent pages or entire sections of your site from being properly added to Google’s search indexes.

Now, two of Google’s most well-known representatives have shed light on the two biggest crawling issues the search engine encounters regularly

In a recent Search Off the Record podcast, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt went into detail on the biggest crawling challenges Google faces in 2025, including the two biggest issues Google sees. 

According to Illyes and Splitt, faceted navigation and action parameters account for approximately 75% of crawling issues that Google encounters. 

Both issues create crawling problems that can overload your server, slow your site down significantly, and create infinite crawling loops. If this happens, Google’s crawlers can expend a massive amount of energy and server bandwidth that can bring your website to a screeching halt and even make your site entirely inaccessible in some cases. 

The Two Biggest Crawling Issues 

Gary Illyes says the two biggest issues account for 75% of crawl challenges.

  • Faceted Navigation – This accounts for 50% of issues according to Google. This is a navigation strategy (typically used on e-commerce sites) to allow users to filter and navigate items based on specific details like price, manufacturer, or size. The issue is that this system can generate a seemingly endless number of URL patterns if it creates a URL for every single combination of filters. Without careful management, this can lead to Google crawlers expending crawl budgets on URLs with negligible search value, duplicate content issues, and slower site performance. 
  • Action Parameters – These account for 25% of challenges. These are URL parameters used to trigger or track specific user actions, such as adding an item to a cart or saving an item to a wishlist. Importantly, these sorts of parameters don’t tend to meaningfully change page content, creating widespread duplicate content issues on your site. 

Additionally, Illyes mentioned a few other, less common crawling challenges:

  • Irrelevant Parameters – These account for 10% of issues. These problems pop up when crawlers notice strings of parameters (typically used to track session ID numbers or UTM parameters) attached to content that Google’s systems deem irrelevant to the actual navigation or page content. 
  • WordPress Plugins or Widgets – Approximately 5% of crawling issues come from WordPress plugins and other tools for sites using similar CRM’s. In some cases, these widgets may modify URLs for event tracking. Google can struggle to understand when this happens, because there is not an established system or pattern that these tools follow. 
  • “Weird Stuff”: – Lastly, Illyes attributed approximately 2% of problems to rare technical issues that pop-up. In the podcast, he cited times when URLs may be double-encoded. This means that when the crawler decodes the URL, it is still left with an unusable encoded string instead of a functional URL. 

In the discussion, Illyes and Splitt go more into detail about these issues, what causes them to arise, and how to prevent them. For more, listen to the full episode here.

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