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Amazon may have a new problem to keep it up at night: Google is increasingly popular with younger shoppers.
New data from Morgan Stanley indicates that 16- to 24-year-olds increasingly turn to Google for more of their online shopping journey.
That’s taking share away from Amazon, both when people set out to research products online for the first time and when they already have a specific product in mind.
As of March, 30% of those Gen Z shoppers who already know what they want to buy still went to Google first — an increase from 21% in September 2024, per Morgan Stanley’s research, which analyzed behavior across Google Search, YouTube, and Gemini.
While the share of other online destinations like Walmart and Facebook has shrunk, it’s Amazon that’s taken the biggest hit. It declined from 41% in September to 34% in March.
Alphawise, Morgan Stanley Research
It’s not clear why e-commerce Google searches are booming among younger users, though Morgan Stanley’s analysts speculate Google’s new generative AI tools may have something to do with it.
Google has previously said it’s seen higher engagement with AI Overviews from users ages 18 to 24. During the company’s first-quarter earnings call in April, Google’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, said that the volume of commercial queries on Google Search had increased with the launch of AI Overviews.
Speaking on the same Q1 earnings call, Schindler also said the number of people shopping using Google’s Lens feature had grown 10%.
Google has been all too aware of the risk of losing younger users. The company’s former Search head, Prabhakar Raghavan, testified in 2023 that Google risked becoming irrelevant to youth, saying the company had been referred to as “Grandpa Google.”
While ChatGPT adoption is growing overall, it remains small when it comes to online shopping, suggesting Google may keep it at bay with its generative AI features.
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