Google Search Console Introduces New Reports for Social Posts

Google has rolled out a new property type in Search Console designed specifically for social and video content, giving creators, publishers, and brands a way to see how their posts on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube are performing directly within Google Search and Discover. It’s a meaningful shift for anyone whose online presence extends well beyond their own website — which, these days, is nearly everyone.

Here’s what’s changed, how it works, and why it matters for your broader search strategy.

What Are “Platform Properties”?

Announced by Google on the Search Central blog on 7 July 2026, platform properties are a new kind of Search Console property built around social and video accounts rather than a website domain. Once you verify a supported account, you get access to the same style of reporting Search Console has long offered for websites, tailored specifically to social content:

• Performance report – total clicks, impressions, and related metrics, filterable and sortable by post and search query, with export options for deeper analysis
• Insights report – a high-level view of recent traffic trends, top-performing posts, and how people are discovering your account through Google
• Achievements – milestone tracking, such as hitting a new threshold of total clicks from Google Search over the last 28 days

At launch, the feature supports four platforms: Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. Notably, it’s available even to creators who don’t run a traditional website, which opens Search Console reporting up to a much wider audience than before.

You can read Google’s full announcement on the Search Central blog, and the setup steps are covered in Google’s help documentation on adding a website or platform property.

How to Set It Up

Getting started follows a similar flow to adding any other property in Search Console:

1. Go to the Search Console property selector and click “Add property”
2. Select one of the four supported platforms — Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube
3. Follow the on-screen steps to securely verify and authorise the connection
4. Once verified, the Performance, Insights, and Achievements reports become available for that account

Google has noted that the rollout is gradual, so the option may not appear in every account immediately, even for eligible platforms.

Why This Matters

This update doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s the latest in a fairly rapid sequence of Search Console changes that have progressively expanded what the tool measures beyond a single website. Late last year, Google began experimenting with folding social channel data into Search Console Insights, which we covered in our piece on Google introducing social channels in Search Console. More recently, Search Console added dedicated reporting for how content performs in AI-driven surfaces, something we explored in our breakdown of the Search Console generative AI performance reports.

Platform properties are a distinct feature from Search profiles, which Google introduced the previous month. Search profiles are public-facing pages that consolidate a creator’s content for their audience; platform properties, by contrast, are purely an analytics layer for the creator themselves — there’s no public-facing element involved.

Taken together, these updates point to a broader pattern: Google is reshaping Search Console around how content is actually discovered today, not just around who owns a website. For creators building a presence primarily on video platforms, this pairs naturally with the strategies covered in our guide to YouTube SEO in 2026, since you can now see, in concrete terms, which search queries are actually sending people to your videos.

What This Means for Your SEO Strategy?

If a meaningful share of your audience finds you through a social or video post rather than your website, this update closes a real visibility gap. Previously, social performance and website performance lived in entirely separate dashboards — social platforms report their own in-app analytics, while Search Console only ever spoke to your domain. Platform properties bring both into view side by side, which makes it far easier to see which channel is actually driving discovery for a given topic or campaign.

Practically, that means:

• You can compare which platform — your website, YouTube, Instagram, and so on — is winning for a particular search topic
• You can identify high-performing social posts and use that insight to inform what you publish next, both on social and on your own site
• Creators without a website can, for the first time, get proper Search Console-level insight into their discoverability on Google

It’s still early days, and the rollout is gradual, so don’t be concerned if you don’t see the option in your account yet. But it’s worth keeping an eye on, particularly if social and video content already play a significant role in how people find your brand.

Keep Up With Search Console Changes

Google has been iterating on Search Console at a fast pace recently, and each update tends to reveal a little more about where search discovery is heading next. If you want a clearer picture of how these changes fit together — or help make sense of what they mean for your own site and social presence — get in touch with our team, and we’ll help you make sense of it.