If you post to Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube for your business, some of that content has been appearing in Google Search results. Not on your website, on the platform. Someone searches, your post comes up, they click it, and the visit never touches anything you measure.
Until recently there was no way to see any of that. Search Console reported on your website and nothing else, so social content sat in a gap: too public to be private, too far outside your domain to be counted.
Google closed that gap. It introduced social channels reporting in Search Console in December 2025, and in July 2026 it announced that platform properties were rolling out globally alongside a guide for reading the data.
What a platform property is
It is a second kind of property in the same Search Console you already use. Your website is one property. Each social or video account you own becomes another.
That distinction is the part most people will miss. The data does not appear in your website’s property. If you open Search Console, look at your site, and see no mention of Instagram, that is the expected behaviour, not a sign the feature is missing. You have to add the account as its own property before anything shows up.
Four platforms are supported: TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube.
The reporting covers Google Search, Discover and Google News. So this is not a measure of how your posts perform on the platform itself. Instagram already tells you that. This is the separate question of how they perform in Google.
Switching it on
There are two paths, and which one applies depends on work you may already have done.
If you have claimed your Search profile, Google’s documentation says every account you verified there is added to Search Console automatically. Nothing further to do. Open Search Console and look at your property list.
If you have not, you add and verify each account individually, the same way you verified your website.
What the two reports show you
The Insights report is the overview. It gives you a traffic trend for the last 28 days, the posts or videos bringing the most people in, the search queries people used to find your channel, and the countries your audience is in.
The query list is the interesting one. It answers a question that has been unanswerable for most small businesses: what are people typing into Google immediately before they land on your social content? That is your audience describing your business in their own words, and it often does not match the words on your website.
The Performance report is the detailed view, and it works the way the website version does. You get clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, and you can filter by country, by date, or by search term.
One caveat worth knowing before it confuses you. If you filter on a YouTube playlist page, the numbers you get describe the playlist page, not the videos inside it. Google states this directly in its guide, and the two are easy to mix up.
Who should bother with this
Not everyone. If you post occasionally and social is not a channel you are trying to grow, adding four properties will tell you very little.
It is worth doing if any of these is true:
- You publish video regularly and have never known whether Google sends anyone to it.
- Your business is visual, so your Instagram or TikTok content answers questions your website does not.
- You suspect your social presence is doing search work you were never counting, and you want to find out whether it is.
The setup cost is a few minutes per account. The thing you get back is a query list, and a query list is the input to almost every other decision. If people are finding your TikTok through searches your website does not rank for, that is a page you have not written yet.
What we would do with it
The pattern we look for first is the mismatch. Take the queries bringing people to your social content, then check them against what your website ranks for. Where the two disagree, the social account is meeting a demand your site is not, and the fix is usually a page rather than more posting.
The second pattern is the reverse. If a post is earning search impressions and almost no clicks, the content is being seen and passed over, which is a different problem with a different fix.
Neither of those is visible from inside Instagram. It needs the search side of the picture, which is what this reporting finally supplies.
If you would like a hand connecting your accounts and reading the first month of data against your website’s own performance, get in touch and we will go through it with you.
