Your Customers Are Searching on Instagram. Here’s How Much That Actually Matters.
You’ve probably read that young people search on TikTok instead of Google, that social is the new search engine, and that your business needs a strategy for it.
Some of that is true. The proportions are badly off.
The number the headlines skip
SparkToro and Datos measured actual search behavior across 41 major platforms and found traditional search engines still take about 80% of searches, with Google alone at 73.7%. Commerce platforms take roughly 10%. Social networks take about 5.5%. AI tools take 3.2%.
Social search is real and it’s smaller than nearly every article on the subject implies.
Two details from that same data are worth more than the headline. Amazon gets more searches than ChatGPT. So does YouTube. The search behavior that actually moved away from Google went to places people already were, for reasons that have nothing to do with novelty.
So the sensible read for a small business: your Google presence still carries the load, and social search is a real supplement for specific businesses in specific categories. Anyone telling you to shift your budget wholesale has not looked at the distribution.
Where it genuinely matters
The overall percentage hides real concentration. Among younger customers, 46% of Gen Z and 35% of millennials say they prefer social platforms to conventional search engines, and roughly 40% of young people prefer TikTok or Instagram over Google Search and Maps for local recommendations. Around 41% use TikTok for search at all, and 76% say they’ve discovered brands and products through social platforms.
If your customers skew under 35, the 5.5% average understates your exposure considerably. For an older customer base it overstates it just as badly.
Category matters as much as age. Social search concentrates in things people want to see before deciding: restaurants and food, beauty, fitness, home projects, travel, anything visual and experiential. A commercial HVAC contractor is not losing business to Instagram search. A bakery, a salon, or a boutique gym might be.
The platforms do different jobs
Treating social search as one thing is the mistake that produces wasted effort. Each platform gets used for a different kind of question.
- TikTok and Instagram carry discovery and recommendations. People are asking what’s good near me, or what should I try.
- YouTube carries tutorials, learning, and reviews. Longer, higher-intent, and more likely to be a purchase decision in progress.
- Reddit carries authentic opinions, which is why it gets cited heavily by AI systems as well.
- Pinterest carries inspiration and planning, often well ahead of purchase.
Being present on the wrong one for your business is worse than being absent, because it costs the same effort and returns nothing.
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What makes you findable
The useful shift is to stop treating social posts purely as broadcasts and start treating some of them as answers to questions.
In practice that means writing captions in the words a customer would actually type rather than in brand language. Say what you do and where you are somewhere in the text, not only in your bio. Put spoken words on screen, because platform search reads on-screen text and transcripts. And keep a few posts that plainly answer common questions, rather than filling the feed with announcements and specials.
None of this requires a new content program. It changes how you write what you were already going to post.
The part that compounds
There’s a second-order effect worth more than the direct search traffic for most small businesses.
Social content now surfaces in three places at once. People search for it directly on the platform. Google increasingly pulls social results into its own pages. And AI systems lean heavily on social and community content when assembling recommendations, which we covered in how to show up when customers ask ChatGPT.
One well-made post can be found three different ways. That’s the real argument for caring about social search, and it’s a better argument than the one about Gen Z abandoning Google.
How to decide whether to bother
Three questions settle it.
- Are your customers under 40? If not, put the effort into your Google Business Profile and reviews instead. Our online reputation guide covers that work.
- Is your business visual or experiential? People search socially for things they want to see first.
- Can you sustain one platform properly? One platform posted consistently beats three posted occasionally, which is the same rule that governs the rest of small business marketing.
If you answered no to any of them, this is a later problem, and our small business marketing strategy guide covers what deserves the attention instead.
If you answered yes to all three, the work is mostly rewriting captions and adding on-screen text to video you’re already making. That’s the cheapest visibility available to you right now.
And if you’re weighing organic social search against paid social, they’re separate decisions with separate math. We worked through the paid side in whether TikTok deserves your ad dollars.
If you’d rather have someone look at where your customers actually search before you commit effort to a platform, that’s the kind of question our digital strategy work answers. Often the honest answer is that your Google presence has more room in it than your Instagram does.
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