A recent notification sent to Instagram users has sparked widespread discussions among search engine marketers. The notification informed recipients that search engines will automatically index public Instagram posts beginning on July 10.
From that date, “search engines will automatically be allowed to show all photos and videos on results pages,” reads the notification. That means “more people could discover content from your professional account outside of Instagram,” the app claimed.
In the wake of that announcement, there has been much debate about what it actually entails. Leslie Ann Hall, the CEO and Founder of ecommerce agency Iced Media, told Glossier that the update is “the biggest disruption in discovery and search behavior, since the introduction of Google, that brands have ever seen.” She claimed that Google and Instagram are “not the most common partners,” but are teaming up to counter the increasing adoption of search engine features on platforms like TikTok and ChatGPT.
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On the other side of the coin, Social Media Today writer Andrew Hutchinson argued that the big update “isn’t actually a major shift,” because Google already indexes Instagram content. He cited an Instagram Help Center post that claims “we allow search engines to index photos and videos from public reels and posts that were uploaded or posted from January 1, 2020 onwards from accounts that meet [certain] criteria.” All that’s changing, per Hutchinson, is the rate at which this indexing is rolling out to new regions.
No matter how impactful the update ends up being, it clearly represents another step in Instagram’s plan to compete in the world of search. After developing only a handful of search features across its first 12 years, Instagram recently revealed that an improved “content search” is on its way to the app. “We’re…starting to invest more in search on Instagram because there’s so much amazing content,” Instagram Head Adam Mosseri said at the time. “And quite frankly, what we call content search — as opposed to searching for an account, actually searching for some type of content — it’s not very good on Instagram.”
Google is already updating its results pages to include more dynamic results, and Instagram posts (especially Reels) are ripe for inclusion in interactive carousels. It’s not clear how big consumer appetite is when it comes to social media-powered search results, but if users want to use Google as a more contextual, ChatGPT-style resource, Instagram wants to be part of the answer.
