What search terms bring people to your Instagram and TikTok posts?

Until now Google Search Console was a tool for site owners: opening a property required owning the domain or having server access. Platform properties change that rule — you verify the account by authorizing the connection through the platform itself, so you can see Google Search data even without a website of your own (Google Search Console Help).

We're thrilled to introduce platform properties, a new Search Console property type to help site owners and creators understand how their social and video posts perform on Google Search and Discover.

— Google Search Central, 2026

Four platforms are supported for now: Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. Each account is added as its own property and reported separately; if you have accounts across several platforms, or manage more than one profile on a single platform, you need to repeat the process for each (Google Search Console Help).

Setup runs through Search Console's standard add-property flow: go to the welcome screen or open the property selector in the sidebar, click "Add property", pick the platform from the list, and follow the prompts to authorize the connection. Once ownership is verified, it takes a few days for data to appear in the reports.

A small but important operational detail: ownership is checked periodically. If your login on the platform side expires the connection is lost and access to the property pauses; once you re-verify you get the same report back and don't have to wait for data to accumulate again (Google Search Console Help).

Platform properties offer the reporting you'd expect from a Search Console property, tailored to social and video content. There are three reports (Google Search Console Help):

• Performance report: total clicks, impressions, average click-through rate and average search position. You can filter by query, post, country and device, and export the data. Coverage includes Google Search plus Discover and Google News — though Discover and News reports only appear if your content actually receives traffic from those surfaces.
• Insights report: a visual overview of recent traffic trends, your top-performing posts, and how people discover you on Google. It also shows which countries your audience comes from.
• Achievements: tracks milestones such as passing a new total-click threshold from Search.

Now the part that matters most — what it doesn't show. Google states it plainly: platform properties only show how your content performs on Google Search; they don't track when people see your content on the platform itself. Google's own example is unambiguous — they won't show how many times your video appeared on TikTok (Google Search Console Help).

There are a few more boundaries worth setting expectations around:

• Data isn't backfilled. Add the property today and the charts start filling from today; the period before setup stays empty.
• On the Insights page, the top summary card shows all clicks to your property across Google (web, image, video and news searches), while the detailed lists below it focus specifically on web search traffic. So the totals in those cards can come out lower than the summary figure — that's a definitional difference, not a bug.
• Instagram stories that show up in Google Search count as impressions; if a user clicks one, it counts as a click.
• Video content counts as an impression when it appears in search results or Discover. A click is recorded even if the video opens inside Google's own viewer — so a "click" doesn't always mean the user reached your page on the platform.
• The default date range on both the Insights page and the Performance report is 28 days.

In short: this tool doesn't open a new traffic source. It makes an existing one — invisible in every dashboard until now — measurable for the first time. That distinction matters when you're setting expectations internally or with a client.

In the official guide updated on 29 July 2026, Google walks through the analyses this data supports (Google Search Central). Four of them are most useful for a brand producing short-form video.

1. Query groups: which themes are rising, which are falling?

The query groups card in the Insights report clusters the search terms sending traffic to your content into themes, and sorts them into top, trending up and trending down. Google positions this directly as a content planning signal: an indication of where to invest your time. In practice it's the most concrete input you have when choosing your next video topic, caption or hashtag approach.

2. The 24-hour filter: catching a spike while it's still hot

The 24-hour filter on the Performance report shows which searches are driving traffic to content you published yesterday. Its value is speed: if a video starts pulling from an unexpected term on Google, you can support that momentum on another channel while it lasts — for example posting an Instagram story referencing the same trend and directing that surging search interest to your other profiles.

3. Format comparison: Reels or carousel?

This is where the agency value sits. Comparison mode lets you group URLs by path fragment and compare formats head to head. Google's own two examples: on YouTube, compare URLs containing `/watch` against those containing `/shorts/`; on Instagram, compare `/p/` against `/reels/`. In other words, "does long form or short form bring more from Google" is now a data question rather than a guess.

The same logic extends to YouTube playlists via a page filter — but Google adds a caveat here: that filter shows the performance of the playlist page, not of the videos inside it.

4. Marking caption and title changes

Search Console's annotations feature lets you bookmark a specific date in your data. When you rewrite a TikTok caption or a YouTube title, mark the day and compare search performance either side of it. Keep in mind this isn't a controlled experiment — seasonality, trends and algorithm shifts all move at once. Still, keeping a record of what changed when beats guessing three months later.

A telling detail: the example Google picked to explain the 24-hour filter in its own guide comes straight from this category. The documentation imagines a GRWM ("get ready with me") TikTok posted yesterday featuring a specific skincare brand or a unique styling tip, and notes that looking at your 24-hour search data might reveal a specific term suddenly bringing people to that new video (Google Search Central). Google choosing cosmetics content to illustrate the feature says something about how well the category fits this behavior.

The mechanism behind it is straightforward. Search behavior in cosmetics is largely built on seeing someone use the product: how a shade sits on skin, what a foundation looks like at the end of the day, how an application technique is actually performed. Those questions are answered by video, not by a text page — and Google surfaces short-video results for exactly those queries. Your Reel already functions as a search result; you just couldn't measure it.

The second layer is brand safety. In cosmetics, what people type into Google usually pairs a product name with a concern: compatibility, side effects, ingredient lists, use during pregnancy. The query report shows you directly which concerns your brand is being searched alongside. That's less a list of content ideas than a map of which question you've left unanswered. The same logic applies on the AI-answer side, which we cover in detail in our GEO guide.

It's worth setting expectations honestly: for most beauty brands, Google-driven social traffic will be a small slice of total reach, and smaller accounts may see sparse charts for months. Treating this as a free consumer-insight source rather than a performance channel is the more realistic frame — even a handful of clicks is enough to learn which words people use to look for you.

• Add every account you're active on, separately. If your brand runs Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, open a property for all three — since data takes time to accumulate, starting early is an advantage in itself.
• Draw no conclusions for the first two weeks. Collection takes a few days, and a new property only shows data from the day collection began. Early conclusions will mislead you.
• Make the query groups card your first real analysis. See which themes are rising; it's the cheapest signal you have for your next content cycle.
• Put format comparison on the calendar. Run the `/p/` versus `/reels/` (or `/watch` versus `/shorts/`) comparison monthly and adjust your production mix accordingly.
• Log caption and title changes as annotations. Three months from now you won't have to remember what changed when.
• Check that the connection stays live. Ownership is re-verified periodically, and data stops flowing if the session expires.
• Wire the data into your existing analytics routine. We compared how to read it alongside the platform dashboards in our social media analytics tools guide.

One final note: Google's Search Profile feature and platform properties are related but not the same thing. A Search Profile is a public profile page for creators inside Google; it's currently available only in the United States and the bar is high — a minimum of 100,000 followers on YouTube, Instagram or X, or 300,000 on TikTok, plus an age requirement of 18 (Google Search Help). If you've already claimed a Search profile, your verified accounts are automatically added as properties in Search Console (Google Search Central). If you haven't, you lose nothing: platform properties carry no follower threshold and are open to everyone worldwide.