Your customers are not all searching the same way, and their age tells you most of it
There is a lot of advice going round that amounts to “you need to be everywhere.” Google, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, AI, Facebook groups, the lot.
For a small business that is useless advice. You have not got time to be everywhere, and you do not need to be. You need to be where your customers are looking, and the single best clue to that is how old they are.
A tattoo studio and a funeral director should be doing almost nothing in common. Both are perfectly good businesses. Their customers live in completely different places.
Search has split by question type
Before the age bit, it is worth understanding what has actually changed.
It used to be simple. Whatever you wanted, you typed it into Google. One box, one habit, everybody.
Now people pick the platform based on what kind of question they are asking, often without thinking about it consciously.
- Urgent and local goes to Google. Burst pipe, locksmith, someone who can come today. The map pack still owns this and probably always will.
- Visual and considered goes to TikTok and Instagram. What does a grey kitchen actually look like. What did that garden look like before. Show me, do not tell me.
- Complex and comparative goes to AI. Which of these three options suits my situation, explain the difference, what should I be asking.
- How does this work goes to YouTube. What is involved, how long does it take, am I being ripped off.
- Who can I trust goes to Facebook groups and other people. Can anyone recommend a decent joiner in Poulton. Forty replies within the hour.
Same person, five different platforms, depending on what they need. That is the actual change, and it matters more than any individual platform’s numbers.
Now the age bit
Here is where it becomes practical, because the generational split is genuinely stark.
Roughly 76% of Gen Z use generative AI. 58% of millennials. 36% of Gen X. And about 20% of boomers.
That is a huge spread, and it means the same piece of advice is urgent for one business and irrelevant for another.
It goes further than AI. Americans aged 16 to 27 favour YouTube, Instagram and TikTok over traditional search engines, with 58% using TikTok for search. Someone in their sixties is almost certainly still using Google and asking their neighbour.
So the question is not “should I be on TikTok.” It is “how old is the person who rings me.”
What that looks like in practice
Take three Fylde businesses.
A boiler engineer whose customers are mostly retired homeowners in Lytham. Their people are on Google, they read reviews, and they ask the neighbour. Spending an evening making TikToks would be a genuinely wasted evening. Get the Google Business Profile immaculate, get the reviews flowing, be easy to ring. That is the whole job.
A wedding venue. The bride is twenty nine and has been on Instagram and TikTok for a year before she rings anybody. She has seen forty venues before she contacts three. Photographs and video are not marketing here, they are the product being shown. Google matters, but it is the second thing that happens, not the first.
A tattoo studio. Almost entirely Instagram and TikTok. Nobody chooses a tattooist from a website. They choose from a portfolio, and increasingly from video. If the work is not visible where those people look, the studio does not exist to them.
Three local businesses. Three completely different answers. Anyone giving all three the same advice is not paying attention.
The complication that catches people out
Here is the bit that gets missed, and it matters.
The person searching is not always the customer.
The care home resident is eighty two. The daughter doing the research is forty five, and she is the one comparing options online at eleven at night.
The elderly couple who need a stairlift are not the ones Googling. Their son is.
The grandad having a knee replacement is not reading about physiotherapy. His wife or his kids are.
So before you decide your customers are too old to bother with any of this, ask who actually does the looking. For a lot of services aimed at older people, the real audience is their adult children, who are squarely in the demographic that uses everything.
That single realisation changes the strategy for a lot of businesses.
The number worth knowing
If you take one figure away, take this one.
43% of adults who use AI tools have asked an AI assistant to recommend a local business in the last ninety days.
Not a survey about the future. Behaviour in the last three months. Restaurants, contractors, professional services, all now competing for AI recommendations alongside the map pack.
That is why I keep going on about this, even to businesses whose customers skew older. It is not that everyone has switched. It is that a meaningful minority already has, and that minority grows every year as the people currently in their thirties become the people in their forties.
”I do not need a website, I have got Facebook”
I hear this a lot, and I understand why. The page is free, it is easy, people already use it, and you can post a photo of a finished job in thirty seconds.
There is a real argument for it, especially locally. Facebook groups are genuinely enormous for recommendations round here, and Marketplace is where a lot of trade happens. Anyone telling you Facebook is dead has not looked at a Poulton community group lately.
But it is worth understanding what you are actually relying on.
The demographics are shifting under you
Facebook is not collapsing, whatever you have read. There are still around 38.8 million UK users, roughly 55% of the population, and UK reach and engagement actually grew last year.
What is changing is who is there, and how much they care.
It remains the strongest platform for reaching people aged 45 and above, and the 25 to 34 bracket is still the single largest UK group. But engagement is falling across every age band. Around 70% of 18 to 24 year olds have reduced their use, alongside 49% of 55 to 65 year olds. Only 21% of young adults think it will still matter in ten years.
So if your customers are in their fifties and sixties, Facebook is doing real work for you today and probably will for a while yet. If they are in their twenties, you are increasingly shouting into a room they have already left.
The bit that should actually worry you
Here is the argument that has nothing to do with demographics, and it is the one I would sit with.
You do not own it. Not the page, not the followers, not the reach. Meta decides who sees your posts and Meta can change that overnight, as plenty of businesses discovered when organic reach quietly collapsed. Your account can be suspended by an automated system with no explanation and no appeal that involves a human being. It happens, and it happens to entirely legitimate businesses.
It is largely invisible to search. A Facebook page rarely ranks for the searches that bring you work. Someone typing “emergency electrician Poulton” into Google is not landing on your page.
And an AI cannot recommend what it cannot read. This is the newest and most serious problem. When somebody asks an AI who to hire, it reads what it can find written down about businesses. A Facebook page is mostly closed to that. Your website is not. If everything you have ever published about your business lives behind Meta’s walls, you are invisible at exactly the moment somebody is being given three names.
So by all means keep the Facebook page. Post the finished jobs, answer the messages, be in the local groups. It works, particularly for an older customer base.
Just do not confuse renting a shopfront with owning one. A Facebook page is somewhere you visit your customers. A website is somewhere they can find you.
And the counter-current
Worth noting the other direction too, because it is not a straight line.
DuckDuckGo saw a real surge when Google pushed AI further into search, with US installs up 18% week on week and traffic to its AI-free search page climbing sharply. Some people genuinely do not want AI results and are actively opting out.
But a lot of it is not a choice at all
Here is something the survey data misses entirely, and you only notice it from actually dealing with people.
A fair number of your older customers are not using Google on a computer. They are using whatever was on the laptop when they got it out of the box in 2015.
Edge opens. Bing is in the box. Nobody changed it, because why would you. There are people on the Fylde who have been searching quite happily for a decade and have never once typed google.com into anything.
The same goes for a chunk of DuckDuckGo use. Somebody’s grandson set it up years ago, said it was better for privacy, and it has been there ever since.
That has a practical consequence. Bing has its own local business listing, Bing Places, and hardly anybody has claimed theirs. It takes about ten minutes and it is largely a copy of what you have already written for Google. If a decent share of your customers are over sixty five and searching on a desktop, that is ten minutes well spent, and your competitors will not have bothered.
Which is a useful reminder generally: people do not optimise their own habits. They use what is in front of them. Assuming everybody has actively chosen their search engine is a mistake, and it is the same mistake as assuming everybody searches the way you do.
None of this is a clean migration from one thing to another. It is fragmentation, and a good deal of it is pure accident. The businesses that struggle are the ones assuming everybody still searches the way they personally do.
So what do you actually do
Three things, and none of them require you to be everywhere.
Work out the age of the person who rings you. Not your customer, the person doing the looking. Be honest about it rather than optimistic.
Pick two places and do them properly. For most local trades that is Google and reviews, and that is genuinely enough. For anything visual or aspirational, add Instagram. For anyone selling to under thirties, video is not optional.
Get the foundations right regardless. Whatever the age, everybody eventually checks a website, everybody reads reviews, and increasingly everything is being read by a machine that summarises you to somebody else. Plain sentences saying what you do, where, and what it costs will serve you on every platform on that list.
That last one is the reason I am not too worried about picking the wrong platform. Being clear, findable and well reviewed works everywhere. It is the thing that gets you into the map pack, quoted by an AI, and recommended in a Facebook group at half nine on a Tuesday.
You cannot be everywhere. You can be worth recommending, which travels.
Not sure where your customers are actually looking? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.