A customer finds your competitor on Instagram. They were not looking for your competitor. They were not looking for anything in particular. That is how social search works.
So what is social search, exactly?
Social search is not a new channel. It is a behaviour that has been happening on your phone for years, and the platforms have only just started calling it something.
Someone types “festival makeup” into Instagram instead of Google. Someone asks TikTok what hotel to stay at in Lisbon. Someone finds a candle brand through a Reel they were not looking for and buys it within 24 hours. That is social search. It is discovery that happens inside apps people opened for something else entirely.
According to a Kantar study Meta commissioned in March 2026, 92% of people now use social platforms for product information. 58% find it more enjoyable than traditional search for discovery. 63% say they buy faster when social plays a role in the decision. Meta did not commission that study to be modest about the findings, but the numbers align with what client accounts show on the ground. People are not going to Google first the way they used to. The journey starts somewhere else now.
Google searches per US user are down nearly 20% year on year. Sit with that number for a moment before the next section.
Why Meta published this now
Two reasons, and neither of them is altruistic.
The first is money. If search budgets start moving away from Google and toward social platforms, Meta’s advertising revenue goes up. A 16-page report making the case for social discovery is one of the more elegant pieces of self-promotion in recent memory. It is dressed as industry insight. It is actually a pitch deck.
The second is timing. Google’s slice of US search ad spending is forecast to fall below 50% in 2026, down from 67.1% a decade ago. Advertisers will spend more than $100 billion on non-Google search ads by 2028. Meta wants to be the obvious answer to where that money goes. Publishing the research that frames the argument is step one.
None of that makes the data wrong. It makes the motive transparent. Those are different things.
What the numbers say that Meta is not loudly saying
Buried in the data is a figure that matters more than the rest. Meta’s own campaign analysis, drawn from over 10,000 geo-tested campaigns across more than 200 North American advertisers, shows that 64% of the customers it delivers are new to the brand entirely. And the return on ad spend for those new customer acquisitions runs 2.3 times higher than traditional search.
In plain English: Google reaches people who were already looking for you. Meta reaches people who had no idea you existed. Both matter. They do completely different jobs. The brands treating them as interchangeable are the ones puzzled by their results.
Meta has also introduced a shopping mode inside Meta AI called Muse Spark – US only for now – that responds to conversational queries and surfaces products directly from catalogues. The principle is the same as search, the interface just feels like a chat. 49% of consumers already use AI assistants for product discovery. 70% expect to use them more for shopping in the next six months. That is not an emerging trend. That is where this has already arrived.
What this means if you run a small business
Three things, and they are all more straightforward than the 16-page report would suggest.
Content needs to work as introduction, not confirmation. The formats driving purchase consideration on social are short videos and Reels (61% of consideration actions), creator reviews and demos (43%), and customer reviews and user-generated content (41%). Short video also ranks as the most useful format for moving someone from interest to action. A grid of product shots and quote tiles is not doing this job. It is talking to people who already know you, not the ones who do not.
Your product catalogue has become part of your search strategy whether you treat it that way or not. If the catalogue is out of date, image-poor, or missing variants, Meta AI has less to work with when surfacing products to people searching within the platform. This is not a future consideration. It is happening now.
Customer reviews are social proof and search signal simultaneously. A business with recent, visible, detailed reviews is more discoverable and more trustworthy at the same moment. These are not separate problems with separate solutions.
Should anything change in your marketing budget?
Not everything, and not immediately.
Traditional search handles utility. Someone who types “accountant in Chelmsford” into Google has already decided they want an accountant. Social search handles influence. Someone who comes across your content on Instagram has not decided anything yet – and that is precisely the opportunity.
The businesses winning at this are not the ones who abandoned Google. They are the ones who stopped treating social content as broadcasting and started treating it as discovery infrastructure. Reels that introduce. Reviews that reassure. A catalogue that actually reflects what is available.
The shift is real. The data is clear enough to take seriously even accounting for who commissioned it. The question is not whether social search matters to your business. The question is whether your content is doing the job of being found by people who do not know you exist yet.
If the answer is no, that is a 24 fingers-shaped problem.
