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Google noticed this before most marketers did. Back in 2022, Prabhakar Raghavan, then a senior vice president at Google, said the company's own studies showed that almost 40% of young people looking for somewhere to have lunch went to TikTok or Instagram rather than Google Maps or Search. It was a remarkable thing for Google to admit in public, and the behaviour has only spread since.
But the story is more interesting than "social media is replacing Google". What's really changing is how people come across things in the first place.
Traditional search works when you know what you're looking for. You type a question, scan the results and click the one that looks right. It's efficient and intentional.
Discovery on social works the other way round. Often people don't know what they want until they see it. A creator unboxes a product, someone films their morning routine, a friend shares a video of a café with a queue out the door. The need and the answer show up at the same moment.
That's a big shift in behaviour. For years the customer journey was drawn as a tidy funnel running from awareness to consideration to search to purchase. Now a single thirty-second video can take someone from "never heard of it" to "added to basket" without a search engine being involved at all.
Adobe's 2026 research into social search found that 49% of US consumers now use TikTok as a search engine, with tutorials (61%) and product reviews (45%) among the most popular things people look for. Among Gen Z, 65% said they'd used TikTok to search for something.
The same research also found that only 4% of Gen Z were more likely to rely on TikTok than on Google, down from 8% in 2024. When asked which platforms they found most helpful for search, consumers still put Google well ahead (85%), followed by Reddit, ChatGPT, YouTube and TikTok.
So social media isn't killing search. It's sitting alongside it and changing how people use it. Someone might discover a brand on TikTok, check what people say about it on Reddit, ask ChatGPT for a comparison and then Google the brand name to buy. For a lot of people the journey hasn't become shorter. It has become messier, with more stops along the way.
The UK picture points the same way. Even for something as established as news, Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report found that four of the top ten individual news sources in the UK are now social media platforms.
Part of the appeal is format. Video shows rather than tells. You can watch the product being used, hear someone's actual opinion of it and judge the results with your own eyes.
The other part is people. A page of search results is anonymous. A creator explaining why they've stuck with the same moisturiser for six months has a face, a voice and a track record. We've written before about the trust gap between brands and people, and social search is that gap playing out in real time.
Then there's the algorithm. Platforms learn what you like and serve you more of it, so discovery feels personal even when it's been engineered.
If discovery happens in feeds rather than on results pages, visibility depends less on ranking and more on being present in the right conversations. A few things follow.
Be findable where people look. Brands need to show up on the platforms their audience uses to look things up, not only the ones where they post announcements. That means paying attention to the words people actually type into TikTok and YouTube search bars, and making content that answers them.
Other people's content counts as much as yours. Reviews, creator videos, Reddit threads and comment sections all shape what people find when they look you up. Brands can't control those conversations, but they can earn more of them.
Distinctive assets matter even more. In a fast-moving feed, your product might appear for a second or two in somebody else's video. If your packaging, colours or characters are instantly recognisable, that fleeting moment still works in your favour.
Content made for discovery looks different from content made for broadcasting. It tends to be useful before it's promotional: how-tos, straight comparisons, behind-the-scenes explanations and answers to the questions people are already asking.
It also has to work without context. Someone who finds you through a search on TikTok may never have heard of you, so each piece needs to make sense to a complete stranger.
And it has to connect across platforms. The TikTok video that sparks interest, the YouTube review that builds confidence, the website that makes buying simple and the search result that confirms you're legitimate are all part of one journey. Treat them as separate channels run by separate teams, and people fall through the gaps.
Another layer is arriving at the same time. Tools like ChatGPT, along with the AI summaries now shown in Google, answer questions directly, often by drawing on what's been said about a brand across the web, including social platforms and forums. Ofcom reported that UK visits to ChatGPT reached 1.8 billion in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period of 2024.
That makes the wider conversation around your brand more important still. The more useful content and positive discussion there is about you, the more likely you are to appear wherever people choose to ask.
Platforms will come and go. The lasting change is in behaviour. People increasingly expect to stumble across the things they want, recommended by people they relate to, in formats that show rather than tell.
For brands, the question moves on from "How do we rank?" to "Are we part of the places and conversations where people find things?" Get that right and you won't only be easy to find. You'll be the thing people come across and want to know more about.
At Together, we help brands build content and creator strategies around how people actually discover things today. If you want your brand to show up where your audience is looking, let's talk.
Is social media replacing Google as a search engine?
Not entirely. Adobe's 2026 research found that 49% of US consumers use TikTok as a search engine, but Google is still rated the most helpful search platform by a wide margin. Social media is changing where discovery starts rather than replacing search outright.
What do people search for on TikTok?
According to Adobe, the most searched content types on TikTok include tutorials (61%), product reviews (45%), personal stories (41%) and influencer recommendations (33%).
How can brands improve visibility in social search?
Create useful content that answers the questions people type into platform search bars, encourage reviews and creator content, use distinctive brand assets that are recognisable in seconds, and make sure every platform connects into one joined-up customer journey.
