Google sends people to your Instagram and YouTube. Now you can see it

What Google added this summer

Search Console now accepts your social accounts as properties, the same way it accepts your website. Google introduced the feature on the Search Central blog on 7 July 2026 under the name platform properties, after a smaller test that started in December 2025. On 29 July 2026 a second post said platform properties were "globally available to everyone".

Four platforms are supported: Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. You add each account through the normal Add property menu in Search Console, pick the platform and log in to authorise the connection. Google's help page says it takes a few days for data to appear, and that if you run several accounts, or more than one profile on the same platform, you add each one as its own property.

Three reports come with it:

• Performance: clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position, with filters by post, search term, country, device and date.
• Insights: a summary of the last 28 days, top posts, groups of search terms that are rising or falling, and the countries your visitors come from.
• Achievements: milestones based on clicks from Google.

Why this matters when you sell across borders

For a small exporter, the social account can be the first thing a foreign buyer finds, especially when the website exists in only one language. Until July you could see how Google sent people to the website, but the social side was a blank.

The country data is the part to look at first. Google's own guide to the feature suggests asking whether some posts do better in specific countries, and which search terms bring traffic you did not expect. For a cross-border seller that turns into three practical questions:

• Which countries find your Instagram or YouTube through Google, and do you have a website page in their language?
• Are people searching your brand name, or a product description such as "korean ceramic mug handmade" or "Hanbok für Hochzeit kaufen"?
• Is a video getting traffic from a country you have never targeted?

Each answer points to a cheap fix: a translated caption, a pinned post, a landing page in the buyer's language, or a link in your bio that goes to the right language version of your site.

What the reports do not show

Read the numbers for what they are. Google's help page sets out the limits plainly.

One more point: do not confuse platform properties with Search profiles, a separate Google feature for creators. Google's help page for Search profiles lists only Canada, India and the United States, and a minimum of 10,000 followers on at least one platform. If you have a Search profile, your verified accounts are added to Search Console automatically. If not, you can still add each account by hand.

Using it without a social media team

Google's guide is written for creators, but most of it works for a small brand with two or three accounts.

Compare formats

The guide shows how to compare short and long videos with comparison mode: on YouTube, URLs containing /shorts/ against URLs containing /watch; on Instagram, /reels/ against /p/. If your product demonstrations only get Google traffic as full-length videos, that is worth knowing before you film the next batch.

Mark the day you change something

Search Console annotations let you pin a short note, up to 120 characters, to a date on the Performance chart. Google suggests using them when you rewrite a YouTube title or a TikTok caption, so you can see later whether search traffic changed. A cross-border use: note the day you add a caption in a second language.

Watch the 24-hour view after a launch

The Performance report has a 24-hour filter. After a new product post or a trade fair video, it shows whether Google is already sending people to it, and through which words.

Put the exports side by side

Google suggests exporting data from each platform property into one spreadsheet. Add your website's Search Console export next to it. If one country clicks through to Instagram but rarely reaches your site, the gap is usually a missing language page or a bio link that goes to the wrong place.

A 15-minute check this week

Add your main Instagram or YouTube account to Search Console today; the data needs a few days to build up. Next Friday, open the Insights report and write down three things: the top five countries, the top five search terms, and whether each of those countries has a page on your site in its language.

If you would like someone to look at how your brand appears across Google, AI search and Naver, including the accounts that are not your website, we run a free visibility check and send the report the same day or the next morning.

Nobody can promise that a social post will rank. What changed this summer is that you no longer have to guess whether it already does.