If you want to know the best tacos in your neighborhood, do you Google it? Or do you open TikTok and type “tacos near me” into the search bar instead?
For a huge and growing share of people, it’s the second one. Social media isn’t just where people scroll anymore — it’s where they search. And that’s a bigger shift for your business than it might first sound like.
The numbers are closer than you’d think
Recent research shows Instagram, TikTok, and Google are practically neck-and-neck as starting points for search: 67% of Gen Z use Instagram to search for things, 62% use TikTok, and 61% use Google. Those numbers used to have a clear leader. Now they don’t.
It gets more specific by category. Fashion-related searches show volume on TikTok that’s over 500% higher than the same searches on Google. Product discovery has already tipped in social media’s favor — TikTok says 61% of its users have discovered a new brand or product on the platform, about 1.5x the rate of other apps.
There’s an important nuance here, though. When people are asked which platform they actually trust most for search, Google still comes out on top, with Reddit, ChatGPT, and YouTube behind it, and TikTok further down the list. So this isn’t “TikTok is killing Google.” It’s that people now use different platforms for different kinds of searching — and if your business only shows up in one of them, you’re invisible in the others.
Why this is happening
Typing “best plumber in [city]” into Google gets you a list of links and ads. Searching the same thing on TikTok or Instagram gets you actual video of the work, reviews from real customers, and a sense of who you’d be hiring — before you ever pick up the phone.
That’s the appeal. Social search isn’t just faster, it comes with built-in proof. People aren’t only looking for information anymore; they’re looking for evidence, and video is a much more convincing form of evidence than a paragraph of text.
How each platform actually functions as a search engine
TikTok works like a discovery engine. Captions, on-screen text, and spoken words in your videos all get read and indexed — meaning the words you use matter just as much here as they do in a traditional SEO strategy. A video that answers a specific question (“how much does a kitchen remodel cost”) will out-search a video that’s just trying to look nice.
Instagram has quietly become more search-friendly too. As of mid-2025, Instagram started allowing public posts from professional and creator accounts to show up in regular Google search results. That means a well-written Instagram caption can now rank on Google the same way a blog post can — captions aren’t just descriptions anymore, they’re functioning like metadata.
YouTube has quietly been the world’s second-largest search engine for years, and that hasn’t changed. What has changed is how often YouTube videos get pulled into Google’s AI-generated answers and cited by AI tools directly — often without the video needing to rank on the first page at all.
Reddit plays a different role entirely. It’s less a place people go to search and more a place their answers come from. Threads on Reddit increasingly show up inside Google results and get cited heavily by AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity when they’re building an answer — because a forum full of real opinions reads as more trustworthy than a page written to rank.
What this actually means for your marketing
You don’t need to be everywhere. You need to be where your customers already are, and treat those platforms like the search engines they’ve become:
- Write captions the way you’d write a meta description — with the actual words a customer would type in, not just a clever line.
- Use on-screen text and spoken keywords in video, not just background music and a filter.
- Post consistently enough that a platform has content to index and recommend when someone searches your category.
- Show up genuinely in relevant conversations on Reddit and similar community sites — it builds the kind of trust that gets picked up by AI answer engines, not just search rankings.
This connects directly to a shift we’ve written about before: search traffic itself is changing shape, and platforms like GA4’s AI Assistant channel are already trying to track where these new sources of visitors are coming from. Social search is one more piece of that same puzzle: your customers’ path to finding you no longer starts and ends at a Google search bar.
The bottom line
Social media didn’t replace search. It became a form of it. If your online presence lives entirely on your website and a Google Business Profile, you’re only covering part of where people are actually looking for businesses like yours. Treating your social channels with the same intent, keywords, and consistency you’d apply to traditional search is quickly becoming non-negotiable, not optional.
