For years, Google Search Console only cared about one thing: your website. If someone found your Instagram profile, a TikTok video or a YouTube Short through Google, you had no idea it happened. That just changed. Search Console now lets you add your social channels as their own properties and see exactly how they perform in Google Search and Discover.
What Google actually launched
Google Search Central announced the feature on July 7, 2026, and has been rolling it out gradually since. The new property type is called a platform property, and it currently supports four platforms:
- TikTok
- X
- YouTube
Once a channel is connected, you get three reports for it: Performance, Insights and Achievements.
What the reports show
Performance
The same clicks, impressions, average CTR and average position you already know from your website property, except now they describe your social content. You can filter by search type (web, image, video and news) to see whether people are finding your Reels in video results or your profile in a regular search.
Insights
A simpler view of recent trends, your top performing posts and the queries people use to find your content on Google.
Achievements
Milestones, like hitting a new click threshold over the last 28 days. Mostly a feel-good report, but it is a quick way to spot a post that took off.
How to set it up
- Open Search Console and click the property selector in the top left.
- Choose Add property, then Platform property.
- Pick the platform and connect the account you want to track.
- Verify ownership through the platform login.
- Give it up to 48 hours for data to show up.
If you do not see the option yet, you are not doing anything wrong. Google is releasing it in waves, so some accounts got it in July and others are only seeing it now.
Why this matters for a local business
Your social profiles are already showing up in Google whether you track them or not. Search your business name and there is a good chance your Instagram or YouTube channel sits right under your website. Until now, that traffic was invisible. With platform properties you can finally answer questions like:
- Which posts are bringing people in from Google months after they were published?
- What are people searching when they land on our Instagram instead of our website?
- Is our YouTube channel ranking for the services we actually sell?
The reports only cover Google Search and Discover. They do not replace Instagram or TikTok's own analytics, and they will not show reach inside the app. Think of them as the missing piece: how Google sends people to your social content.
What we are doing with it for clients
We are connecting every client's main social channels in the first week of onboarding, then adding a social section to the monthly report. The goal is simple: find the posts Google already likes and make more of them, write captions with the words people actually search, and make sure every profile links back to the page that converts.
If you want help setting this up or making sense of what it shows, start a conversation with us. It is a 10-minute setup that most businesses have not done yet.
