Social content is search content, and now Google can prove it

Google Search Console can now measure your social content in search with a new property type called platform properties. This lets site owners and creators verify Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube accounts and see how that content performs in Google Search and Discover. Google announced it on 7th July 2026, and although it is not yet available in Australia it will be rolling out gradually over the coming weeks.

This is huge news because it lets us track how social content shows up in Google Search. The even bigger story is that this is Google confirming that discovery is no longer exclusive to your website presence.

Once a platform property is verified, the data feeds into three places in Search Console:

• Performance report: clicks and impressions for your social content in Google Search, filterable by post and by query, with export if you want it in your own reporting stack
• Insights report: a summary of recent traffic trends, top-performing posts, and how people are finding your accounts through Google
• Achievements: milestone tracking, such as hitting a new clicks threshold from Google Search over a rolling 28-day period

The detail worth sitting with is the query-level data. You can now see the actual search terms sending people to a specific TikTok or Instagram post, inside Google’s own tool, not a third-party estimate.

Up until now, proving that social content contributed to search visibility meant piecing together platform analytics, third-party tools and some educated guessing. That data now comes directly from Google.

It also removes any reason for keeping social and SEO planning separate. If you’re briefing organic social purely on cultural relevance or platform trends, now is the time to add a second layer: search demand. The query data tells you the language your audience is actually typing into Google, which is a more reliable input than guesswork for hooks, captions and video titles.

Search Console has quietly been expanding beyond your website for a while now. Google already shows you how your pages perform inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, in the same tool where you’ll soon see how your TikToks and Reels perform in classic search. Search visibility and AI visibility are being measured side by side, and social content now sits inside both.

Why is all of this important? It lines up with something we’ve been telling clients for a while: social content is search content, and it should be planned and measured alongside your SEO data, not run as a separate channel.

Teams that keep SEO and social in separate strategies are going to feel the gap widen from here. There is no longer any doubt that the industry is shifting towards aligning your strategies across platforms for increased visibility on both search and AI platforms.