What your Instagram and YouTube are doing in Google: Search Console now shows it

What Instagram and YouTube do in Google

Google Search Console was always about your website. Since late July, it is also about your social channels: you can now add a property of your Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube channel to it and see what Google sends to those posts.

That sounds like something you'd want to get straight to work on. First, we checked whether there is actually anything to see, because a report on traffic that doesn't exist is an empty graph. We went through twelve Dutch search queries, and the result determines pretty precisely who this is of interest to.

In short:

• It's called platform properties and it works for Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. LinkedIn and Facebook are not included.
• You only see what Google Search, Discover and News send to your post. Not your reach on the platform itself.
• Out of eight local search queries, we found two social results in 160 positions. Out of four informational and inspirational search queries, thirteen in eighty.
• So for a restaurant, hairdresser or hotel there is little to measure. For those who create explanations, recipes or reviews, all the more so.
• Setting up takes five minutes per profile and you need the login details for that account.

In this article:

• What are platform properties
• What it doesn't measure
• Our own check: does Google actually refer to social?
• What that means for where you publish
• Set up in five minutes
• What you do with the figures
• For whom this yields nothing

What are platform properties

Search Console is the place where you can see which search queries your website appears for in Google, how often, and how frequently it is then clicked. That has now been added for social channels.

You add a property for an account that belongs to you: an Instagram profile, a TikTok account, an X account or a YouTube channel. After that, you will see the same kind of reporting for that account as for a website: which search queries your posts appear for in Google Search, how often they are shown and clicked, and whether they turn up in Discover or Google News.

The feature became available worldwide on 29 July 2026, so here too. Google simultaneously published a guide on analysing social and video performance.

Why this exists is not very complicated. More and more companies are no longer publishing the majority of their material on their own site, but on the channels where the audience is. Google indexes that stuff, sends traffic to it, and until now, nobody could see how much.

What it doesn't measure

This is the misunderstanding you want to clear up straight away, because otherwise you might end up looking at figures that mean something other than what you think.

It only measures what Google does. Impressions in the report are impressions in Google, not on Instagram. If a reel gets 40,000 views on Instagram itself and ten impressions in Google, then it will show ten. That is not an error in the measurement; that is precisely what it measures.

It is per profile. If you have three Instagram accounts and a YouTube channel, those are four properties that you add all four separately.

LinkedIn and Facebook are missing. For Dutch B2B companies, where LinkedIn is pretty much the only channel that matters, this entire feature isn't going to deliver anything for the time being.

Furthermore, the Google forum contains reports from people for whom the option does not appear or for whom the linking fails. If you encounter that, it is not necessarily your fault.

Our own check: does Google actually refer to social?

Before you start setting up a dashboard, the most useful question is: does Google in our country actually refer to social posts? We requested twelve Dutch search queries and counted per query how many results in the top twenty pointed to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Facebook. August 2026, standard organic results.

First eight searches of the kind our clients live on:

• Scheveningen beach club: no social outcome whatsoever
• book Amsterdam restaurant: none
• Hotel Zandvoort: none
• hairdresser utrecht: none
• personal trainer amsterdam: none
• wedding photographer North Holland: none
• brunch haarlem: one Instagram profile, at number seventeen
• lunchroom purmerend: one Facebook page, in twelfth place

Two social results in 160 positions. The rest of those pages consist of the local map with business profiles, the websites of the businesses themselves, and guides like TripAdvisor and TheFork.

To be clear: this says something about Google, not about the value of social. A good Instagram account delivers returning guests, bookings via a direct message and an audience you reach nowhere else. It's just that this doesn't happen via a search query, and that is precisely what this report measures.

Then four search queries of the explanation and inspiration type:

• how to cut your own fringe: six, with YouTube in spot one and a TikTok video at thirteen
• home workout with no equipment: three, plus a separate video block at the top
• pesto pasta recipe: two, including an Instagram reel
• best airfryer 2026: two YouTube videos

Thirteen in eighty positions. That is roughly twelve times as often as with the local search queries.

What that means for where you publish

Those two lists say more about your content strategy than about Search Console.

For search queries where someone wants to buy, book or reserve something, social media doesn't cut it. The local map appears at the top, followed by the websites themselves. If you want to be listed there, your focus needs to be on your Google Business Profile and your own pages. A reel isn't going to help you there, no matter how good it is.

For search queries where someone wants to know something, video can take the place your site never will. Look at “how to cut your own fringe”: a YouTube video is in first place. A hair salon that makes those kinds of videos gets onto the screens of people who aren't even thinking about an appointment yet. For “hairdresser utrecht”, that same salon doesn't get a look-in with video.

Practically translated, by type of business:

• Hospitality and hotels: put your energy into the business profile, photos, reviews and your own reservation page. Social media is for your existing audience, not for Google.
• Hairdressers, trainers, therapists: the explanation work can indeed be delivered via video. That is the gap between “I have questions about this” and “I want to book an appointment”.
• Webshops: reviews and comparisons on YouTube consistently appear for purchase-intent queries. That is precisely the kind of search query where your product should feature.
• Explainers and creators: this is where this feature is most valuable, because that's where the traffic is that you can now see for the first time.

Set up in five minutes

Adding it takes very little time. You do need access to the account itself, so do this together with the person who manages the socials.

1. Go to Search Console and open the menu in the top left where you switch property.
2. Select “Add property”. The list now shows platforms alongside websites.
3. Click on the platform you want to add and follow the steps. You will log in using that platform's account, as this is how you prove that it belongs to you.
4. Repeat that separately for each profile and each channel.

If you had already created a Search profile with Google for the same channel, the data should appear straight away.

Something to watch out for: this is access to your business accounts. Do it from a company Google account rather than an intern's personal login, and set up multiple owners. Otherwise, in a year's time, the only access to your figures will be on the laptop of someone who no longer works there.

What you do with the figures

Once the figures come in, the question is what you do with them. Four things that we think make sense.

• Look at the search queries, not the total. The number of impressions is a vanity metric. The search terms people use to find your post tell you what your audience is engaged with, and that is directly actionable for your next topic.
• Use the filter for the last 24 hours to see peaks. If traffic suddenly starts going to an old post, that is the moment to bring it to the top or make a follow-up to it.
• Export the channels and compare them side by side. Put YouTube, Instagram and TikTok into one file and you will see which format is doing the work instead of which platform is shouting the loudest.
• Add a note to changes. If you adjust a title or caption, make a note of it, then a month later you can see if it had any effect. Without that note, you are just looking at a graph and guessing.

And don't look daily. These kinds of figures take weeks before there's a trend.

For whom this yields nothing

Be honest about the likelihood that this will yield little for you. That applies if you are mainly on LinkedIn, because that channel is not participating. It applies if you depend on local search queries, because social results hardly appear there. And it applies if you hardly publish, because then you are measuring an empty channel more precisely than before.

That's no reason not to turn it on. It takes five minutes and in six months you'll have history. It is a reason not to make a weekly report out of it before you've seen that there's something in it.

What we look at ourselves with clients: first whether Google refers to their channels at all, only then whether it is worth driving traffic to them. That order saves a lot of work on dashboards that nobody opens.

Switch it on, and look back in two months

Turn it on for the channels you actually use, leave the rest, and take another look in two months. If it yields nothing, then you will know that with figures instead of a gut feeling.

Do you want to know whether your social channels are driving traffic from Google, or are you looking for someone to set up this kind of measurement so you don't have to figure it out manually every quarter? We can help with that.