Google Search: A quest led by GenAI and Gen Z

Google's chief Pichai flagged off a 're-imagining' of its search service this week. It's an AI upgrade prompted by the rise of chatbots and chat-happy youth. Did it need a defence flank?

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For over two decades, Google has been shaping how the world searches for information with its artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. But as Generative AI (GenAI) chatbots grow more conversational and capable, the Big Tech company has been pushed into a "total re-imagining of Search," as its CEO Sundar Pichai said this week in his Google I/O 2025 keynote address. The catalyst is Generation Z: netizens born between 1997 and 2012 who prefer context, relevance and answers in natural language over blue links. Instead of 'googling,' Gen Z youth tend to treat chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) as their first point of inquiry. This explains the growing popularity of AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's own Gemini, Meta's Llama, Anthropic's Claude and Perplexity's search engine. These tools combine LLMs with live web data to deliver ready responses with sources, summaries and follow-up cues.