Nearly two in three American adults say they have left Google's search results for Reddit or TikTok because Google was not helping them find what they needed, according to a survey of 1,014 US adults that web hosting company Hostinger published on October 30, 2026. The same survey found that 88% still used Google at some point while choosing the last business they picked, and 45% name it as the single platform they rely on most to find businesses.

Both numbers come from one dataset, and they pull in different directions. Hostinger's report, titled "Is Google still the front door to the internet?", answers its own question largely in Google's favor. "Google is not going anywhere, and neither is the humble business website," it states. Yet the sharpest findings sit underneath that headline conclusion, in a generational split that puts TikTok, Instagram and Reddit at the start of the search journey for a large share of adults under 30, and in a set of answers on AI assistants that shows people using chatbots for recommendations while almost never acting on them unchecked.

In Short

Hostinger asked 1,014 US adults in October 2026 where they start looking for businesses, and 65% said they have left Google's results for Reddit or TikTok because Google was not helping, rising to 80% among Gen Z. That matters to anyone who buys search ads or depends on organic traffic, because the same people still overwhelmingly pass through Google, with 88% using it while choosing their most recent business. What changes is the route rather than the destination: discovery is spread across search, social video, forums and AI assistants, and 62% of respondents say they almost always check an unfamiliar business's website before choosing it.

Who ran the survey, and how

Hostinger, which sells web hosting, domains and an AI website builder, ran the survey itself. According to the methodology section of the report, written by Hostinger content writer Simon Lim, the company surveyed 1,014 US adults aged 18 and older in October 2026 "about where they discover businesses online, where they start their search, and when they visit a business's website before deciding."

Respondents were grouped by generation using Pew Research Center age bands as of 2026. Gen Z (18 to 29) made up 18% of the sample, millennials (30 to 45) 46%, Gen X (46 to 61) 27%, and baby boomers (62 and older) 9%. The average age was 42. Women accounted for 53% of respondents, men for 46%, and under 1% self-described or preferred not to say.

The sample leans young. By PPC Land's calculation, 9% of 1,014 respondents is roughly 91 people aged 62 or over, while millennials number around 466. Hostinger states a margin of error of about plus or minus 3 percentage points for the full sample at a 95% confidence level, widening to about 5 points for millennials, 6 for Gen X, 7 for Gen Z and 10 for baby boomers. The report calls subgroup results "directional" and says results are reported only for groups of at least 5% of the sample.

Three caveats carry weight for anyone reading the numbers. The first is that, in the report's own words, "All figures are self-reported and reflect stated attitudes and recalled behavior, not observed behavior." The second is that the methodology does not name a panel provider, give exact fieldwork dates, or say whether responses were weighted to match the US adult population. The third is that the report does not publish the wording of its questions, which matters most for the 65% figure discussed below.

Google leads in seven of eight categories

Asked where they start looking in eight everyday categories, respondents named Google first in seven. According to Hostinger, the share starting on Google was 65% for professional services, 59% for healthcare, 57% for local services, 56% for restaurants, 50% for travel, 48% for financial information and 43% for products to buy. The eighth category, tutorials, was led by YouTube at 49%. YouTube is owned by Google, which means every one of the eight categories was led by a Google property.

When respondents named the single platform they rely on most to find businesses, 45% picked Google, which Hostinger says is "more than five times" the next choice. The report does not name the runner-up or give its share.

A broader question asked how people had found a business in the past three months, with multiple answers allowed. "Google or search" led at 69%, followed by word of mouth at 46%, maps at 33%, Facebook at 33%, Instagram at 32%, an AI chatbot at 28% and TikTok at 24%. The report does not specify which maps services were included, so the 33% figure may contain Google Maps usage alongside rivals such as Apple Maps.

AI assistants appear as a meaningful starting point only in specific categories. According to Hostinger, 17% start with AI for healthcare, 16% for financial information and 14% for tutorials, making AI the second most common first stop for health and money questions, behind Google. For restaurants, just 3% start with an AI assistant. When people wanted a real person's opinion, 24% went to Reddit first.

Where Gen Z starts instead

The generational gap is where Google's position looks least settled. According to the report, 29% of Gen Z respondents start a product search on social or video platforms, compared with 4% of boomers. Travel shows a similar split: 28% of Gen Z begin on social or video, against 5% of boomers.

TikTok stands out on its own. Nearly one in five Gen Z adults (19%) start a product search on TikTok, which Hostinger describes as more than double the rate for all adults, though the report does not publish the all-adult figure. The share reaches 38% among Gen Z women. The report does not state the size of that subgroup; women aged 18 to 29 are a fraction of a Gen Z sample that numbers about 183 people by PPC Land's calculation.

Hostinger's own summary of this section is restrained. "Older shoppers still default to Google almost everywhere, so the real story is that younger people go social-first for products and travel, while the rest of the map stays search-first," the report states.

The 65% figure and its limits

The most quoted number from the study is that 65% of adults "have left Google's results for Reddit or TikTok because Google wasn't helping." The share falls steadily with age, according to Hostinger: 80% of Gen Z, 72% of millennials, 52% of Gen X and 41% of boomers.

What the figure measures is less clear than the headline suggests. The report gives no time window and no frequency. As phrased, a single occasion at any point in the past would appear to count, so the 65% says nothing about how often people make the switch or whether the habit is growing. Reddit and TikTok are combined into one answer, so the data cannot show which platform drew more people away. Nor does the report say whether leaving Google's results for Reddit means opening Reddit directly or clicking a Reddit thread that Google itself surfaced, a distinction with real consequences for both companies' traffic.

The finding sits next to another that points the other way. According to Hostinger, 88% of respondents used Google at some stage while choosing their most recent business. More than one in ten (12%) chose their most recent business without using Google at any point. The report describes Google as "the hub that almost everyone passes through."

Is that a contradiction? Not necessarily. The two questions measure different things: one asks whether a behavior has ever happened out of frustration, the other asks about a single, recent decision. Taken together, they describe people who move between platforms within a single search journey rather than people who have stopped using Google.

Google against AI assistants

The AI findings are where the dataset produces its most divergent readings. According to Hostinger, 93% of people have received a business recommendation from an AI assistant, a figure the report says is just as true for boomers (96%) as for Gen Z (88%). The report does not state the base for that number or its time frame. It is hard to reconcile with the separate finding that 28% found a business through an AI chatbot in the past three months unless the 93% refers only to people who use AI assistants, or covers a much longer period.

Among respondents who used both Google and an AI assistant to choose a business, 38% found Google more helpful, 26% found the AI more helpful and 36% found them about the same. Nearly one in three (30%) of those who used AI instead of Google said they did so because Google was not surfacing what they needed. The report does not give the size of either group.

Trust in AI recommendations is thin. According to Hostinger, 94% check another source before acting on an AI recommendation, and only 6% would do business with a brand based solely on what an AI assistant recommended. The most common check is the business's own website, which 42% say they would look at first. "Here is the twist: people fold these tools into their research rather than hand over the decision," the report states.

Hostinger argues that for businesses in healthcare and finance, AI search optimization, a practice more widely known as GEO, is worth the effort "since it affects whether assistants mention you at all." The report links that recommendation to Hostinger's own tutorial on the topic.

Two readings of one dataset

The same AI numbers have been presented with a different emphasis in Hostinger's promotional material for the study. There, the 38/36/26 split is expressed as 62% of people who used both Google and AI not finding Google more helpful, a figure obtained by adding the "about the same" and "AI more helpful" groups. The 45% who name Google as their most-used platform becomes 55% who do not.

Both versions are arithmetically correct. They are not equivalent. In the report itself, Google came out ahead of AI assistants by 12 points among people who used both, and more than a third saw no difference. Framed as 62%, the same answers suggest that most users found AI at least as useful as Google, which is also true. Which reading a marketer takes from the study depends largely on which document they read.

The website argument

Roughly a third of the report concerns business websites, which is also Hostinger's commercial territory. According to the survey, 70% of respondents see a business as less legitimate when they cannot find its website, and 44% would likely choose a competitor they can find instead. The reaction is strongest among older adults: 64% of boomers would choose a competitor over a business with no findable website, against a range of 40% to 45% for younger generations. With about 91 boomers in the sample, that 64% carries the widest margin of any figure in the report.

Respondents described what they check once they reach a website. According to Hostinger, 67% look for prices or fees, 53% for product details, 51% for photos or examples, 46% for availability or hours, 44% to confirm the business is real and 38% for customer reviews. Some 62% say they almost always check an unfamiliar business's website before choosing it.

The website also functions as the verification step for discovery that begins elsewhere. Among people who return to Google after starting on another platform, 55% are looking for the business's official website, the report says. The site then has to match what people found. According to Hostinger, 87% of respondents had run into missing or mismatched details, and 32% of that group simply chose a different business. By PPC Land's calculation, that is about 28% of the full sample, assuming the 87% refers to all respondents, which the report does not state explicitly.

Reviews on other platforms compete with the website for credibility, particularly among younger adults. About two in three Gen Z respondents (66%) trust a business's Reddit or TikTok reviews more than its own website or its Google reviews, according to the report. That share falls to 50% among millennials, 32% among Gen X and 31% among boomers. The finding points to the weight that UGC on forums and video platforms now carries for younger buyers, relative to content a business controls.

Hostinger also states that about one in three small businesses still operate without a website, citing its own small business statistics page rather than this survey.

The commercial frame

The report closes with a product mention for Hostinger AI Builder, which, according to the company, "generates a first version from a description of what you do," with hosting included. The conclusion that a business website "still closes the deal" aligns with what Hostinger sells, which does not make the data wrong but is relevant context for how the findings are framed.

The page publishing the report also carries "Summarize with" buttons for ChatGPT, Claude, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity and Grok. Each opens the assistant with a pre-written prompt asking it to summarize the article and "Highlight how Hostinger's tools and tutorials help users achieve website growth and online success based on this guide." A separate link invites readers to add Hostinger as a preferred source on Google. The buttons sit on a page reporting that only 6% of people would act on an AI recommendation without checking, and they show the same company working to shape what those assistants say about it.

How the findings sit against other data

Recalled behavior and measured behavior do not always line up, and PPC Land has covered several datasets that track the same shift in different ways.

Clickstream data gives a different picture of Google's position. The Datos Q1 2026 state of search report, based on a desktop panel of tens of millions of users, put Google's US search share at 94.3% in March 2026, with AI tools accounting for 1.65% of US desktop events. The same report found that Reddit had risen from third to second place among the destinations US users visit after a search. That last finding fits Hostinger's 65% figure more closely than its headline does: much of the traffic heading to Reddit appears to start on a search engine.

Reddit's own numbers complicate the story further. In its third-quarter results on October 29, 2026, Reddit said its search referral traffic was down meaningfully, with October referrals falling by more than 1 million per week on average, and warned that daily active uniques could fall by a low-double-digit percentage from 130 million in the fourth quarter. People may tell surveyors they leave Google for Reddit, but in late 2026 Google was sending Reddit fewer visitors, not more.

Google's results the day before showed no sign of user flight. Alphabet reported that Google Search and other revenue rose 12% to $63.35 billion in the third quarter of 2026, while chief executive Sundar Pichai said year-over-year query growth was the highest in five years. Revenue growth had, however, slowed from 17% in the second quarter, and Search revenue rose by just $79 million on the previous quarter.

The question of whether people stay on Google is also separate from whether they click through to websites once there. AI Overviews have changed that calculation: an Ahrefs study published in February found that, as of December 2025, AI Overviews reduced the click-through rate for position-one content by 58%. A user who reads an answer on the results page and leaves is engaged in zero-click search, and a survey asking whether people "used Google" would count that session the same way as one that ends with a visit to a business's site.

On trust in AI, Hostinger's numbers sit in line with earlier surveys. A Yelp study conducted with Morning Consult among 2,202 US adults found that only 15% trust AI search results "a lot", while 63% double-check results against other sources. A Kinsta survey of 1,008 US consumers published in September found that 18.8% always trust an AI product recommendation without further research, roughly three times Hostinger's 6%. The gap likely reflects question wording: trusting a recommendation is not the same as being willing to book on it alone. Kinsta also found that 61.1% of US consumers associate the standard of a company's website with the standard of its products, a finding close to Hostinger's legitimacy figure. RTB House reported in August that AI tools lengthen the final purchase decision for 42% of US shoppers, consistent with people adding AI as a research step rather than a shortcut.

The checks people run on AI answers have grounds. An Empirank audit published in August found that 20 of 182 businesses recommended by OpenAI carried a contradicted claim, and a Contentsquare survey in September found that 21% of shoppers had seen AI information differ from a brand's website.

Reddit's role as a verification layer has also been measured before, by Reddit itself. Its Path to Purchase 2026 survey, conducted by Attest in May 2026 among 13,956 US adults, found that half of US shoppers verify AI recommendations on Reddit and that more than one in five include "Reddit" in their search queries. A later Reddit post drawing on the same data said first-hand accounts outweigh critic and influencer reviews by two to one as the most important purchase factor in the US. Both studies were commissioned by the platform they describe, as Hostinger's was by a company whose business depends on websites. Reddit has meanwhile built search into a product of its own: when it began testing AI shopping carousels in search in February, PPC Land reported more than 80 million weekly searches on Reddit in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 60 million a year earlier.

TikTok's search ambitions are older still. TikTok's own data from June 2024 showed 57% of its users using search, with 23% starting a search within 30 seconds of opening the app, though users have also complained about the quality of the results. And on local discovery specifically, a much smaller survey by Youtech in July 2025 found that 78.7% of 150 US consumers primarily use traditional search engines to find local businesses, while 27.3% had used an AI assistant for local search in the previous week.

Why this matters for marketers

For search advertisers, the study offers little evidence that Google's reach is shrinking in absolute terms. An 88% usage rate in recent business decisions, a lead in seven of eight categories and a 45% most-used share are not the figures of a platform losing its audience. What the data does suggest is that Google is increasingly one stop among several, and that for younger adults it is often not the first. A campaign that only captures demand at the search stage may be reaching people after their shortlist was formed on TikTok, Instagram or Reddit.

That has measurement consequences. If a Gen Z buyer discovers a product on TikTok, checks Reddit for opinions and then searches the brand name on Google to find the official site, last-click attribution will credit the branded search. Hostinger's finding that 55% of people who return to Google after starting elsewhere are looking for the official website describes exactly that pattern. Branded search volume, in that case, reflects demand created elsewhere.

For publishers and businesses that depend on organic traffic, the AI findings are double-edged. People consult assistants widely but rarely act on them alone, which keeps the business website in the decision path. At the same time, an assistant that summarizes a business accurately may save the user a visit, and one that gets it wrong sends them elsewhere. The 87% who said they had encountered missing or mismatched details suggest that consistency across a website, business listings and third-party platforms is already a source of lost customers, before AI is added to the chain.

The study also illustrates the limits of vendor research as a guide to strategy. Hostinger's survey is transparent about its sample, its margins and its reliance on recall, which is more than many such reports offer. But its questions are unpublished, its subgroups are small, and the same answers have been framed both as proof that Google remains the front door and as evidence that most people find AI at least as helpful. Neither reading is false. The numbers alone do not settle which matters more.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Hostinger, the web hosting and website builder company, which surveyed 1,014 US adults and published the results in a report written by content writer Simon Lim. The findings concern Google, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and AI assistants.

What: A self-reported survey on where Americans start looking for businesses. It found that 65% have left Google's results for Reddit or TikTok because Google was not helping (80% of Gen Z), that 88% still used Google while choosing their most recent business, that Google leads in seven of eight categories, that 94% check another source before acting on an AI recommendation, and that 44% would likely pick a competitor if they could not find a business's website.

When: Fieldwork took place in October 2026. Hostinger published the report on October 30, 2026.

Where: United States, among adults aged 18 and older, with a stated margin of error of about plus or minus 3 points for the full sample and up to 10 points for the smallest subgroup.

Why: The data shows business discovery spreading across search, social video, forums and AI assistants, most sharply among adults under 30, while Google remains the platform most people pass through. For advertisers and publishers, it raises questions about attribution, the role of branded search and the weight of the business website, though the survey's reliance on recall, unpublished question wording and small subgroups limits how far its numbers can be pushed.