By Luis Rijo
Publication Date: 2026-11-11 20:50:00
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…
