TikTok, the fastest-growing social media app, has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity.

TikTok is taking the world by storm when it comes to trending and user-base growth. According to Google's internal statistics, which TechCrunch first reported, nearly 40% of Gen Z preferred using TikTok and Instagram over Google Search and Maps.

As reported by Insider, over the past few years, TikTok, the fastest-growing social media app, has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity. As a result, Instagram and Snapchat launched copycat video features called Reels and Spotlight.

A Google executive has acknowledged that TikTok's style is altering how young people browse the internet and that Google is attempting to keep up. It turns out that TikTok poses a danger to Google's business outside of YouTube. A Google executive stated today, speaking at an industry event, that the growing preference for social media and videos as the first stop on younger users' road to discovery is having an impact on core Google services, like Search and Maps.

At the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, Google's Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversees the Knowledge & Information division, made mention of the well-known social media platforms in a broader discussion about the company's future products and usage of artificial intelligence.

He casually mentioned that younger users were now frequently using applications like Instagram and TikTok instead of Google Search or Maps for discovery during a talk about the evolution of search.

We face fierce competition from various sources, including general and niche search engines as well as specialist apps, according to Google, which confirmed this data to Insider.

In order to appeal to a younger audience, Google highlighted modifications it expects to make to its search engine, such as the capability for a user to pan their camera over a picture and "instantly gather insights about several things in a wider scene." By 2024, according to Insider Intelligence, YouTube will lose ground to TikTok in terms of advertising revenue.