Instagram Posts Are Ranking and Showing in Google and Bing - SEO Meets Social

Starting July 10, 2025, Search Engines began indexing public Instagram content from professional accounts, making Instagram SEO a fresh tool. This is a significant change that might change social exposure and content strategy for brands. It opens up a whole new channel for organic visibility by allowing individual Instagram content - photos, captions, and possibly even reels - to show up in Google and Bing.

The update applies only to Business, Creator, and Over 18 accounts that are public. Private profiles, personal accounts, and accounts owned by underage users are not included. Meta explains the change in their help center docs this way:

"Instagram generally requests that search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing do not index the content of users’ photos and videos from stories, reels, posts, and highlights. However, we allow search engines to index photos and videos from public reels and posts that were uploaded or posted from January 1, 2020 onwards from accounts that meet all criteria..."

Instagram has been mostly operating off the open web for years. Posts could only be partially found by search engines and were only displayed within the app. Due to Instagram's integration with Search Engine indexing, social media content can now appear directly in search results, which presents both new potential and threats for companies that depend on social media and SEO.

Qualifying accounts (below) will have their posts made visible external to se's like Google and Bing. This includes images, Reels, posts, carousels, and videos, that was shared after January 1 2020, and the account settings (below) allow it.

• Only content starting from January 1, 2020
• Media: videos, reels, photos, and carousels
• Captions, alt-text, and hash tags
• All posts shared public

Emarketer says Instagram is the #1 Social Media Platform for 17-24yr olds (It's fashionable among marketers not to include Youtube as a social media site as it is closer to a blog with comments):

• Hospitality and travel: Hotels, restaurants, and destinations with lots of rich visual content can hit up searchers earlier in the funnel.
• Ecommerce: Insta Shopping posts and visual guides can complement existing product pages in the SERPs.
• Events and local businesses: Whoa, geotagged content now has potential SEO weight.
• Video: We all know Google has had a growing love affair with video on the Serps that has grown and grown the last five years:

Our company's video Instagram posts are showing up under videos on the SERP when searching our company name. They are in a high position on the SERP, taking up a lot of good real estate, showing the increasing importance of utilizing video content for SEO purposes - and that video content for SEO doesn't just mean "YouTube" anymore. - Reva Minkoff , Digital4Startups Inc.

Obviously, don’t expect a flood of traffic just yet. Early testing suggests Instagram links still open in-app when users are logged in. Still, visibility in the SERPs builds brand awareness, influences CTR on other listings, and signals legitimacy. No reason not to use every asset at your disposal.

1. Switch to  Pro-Public Account: Set your insta to public business or creator account, as only these are eligible for Google indexing. Check this in Settings → Account → Account Type. Private, personal, under 18 accounts won’t be indexed.
2. Indexabele: Go to Instagram Settings → Account Privacy → Search Engine Indexing and ensure it’s enabled.
3. Optimize Instagram profiles: Treat bios and captions like mini-meta descriptions. Use relevant seo keywords where natural.
4. Make posts evergreen: Posts with lasting value (how-tos, product highlights, FAQs) may now have longer search shelf life. (and watch the quality of images)
5. Crosslink intelligently: If your posts feature blog content or product pages, link back when possible. Google could use this to connect Instagram posts to your site’s topical authority.
6. Links and More Links: Google loves links. What better place to find them than in authenticate user posts on Insta? As Guy Kawasaki says: "Link early, link often, and link as the last thing out the door. "
7. Monitor branded queries: Look at how your Instagram content is surfacing in SERPs for your brand name or product keywords.

"Instagram competing with TikTok for search dominance is just the beginning - this is forcing every platform to become search-optimized, which means every piece of content needs to serve both social engagement and search discovery." - John Murdock, Director, Social Media, Tandem Interactive

The new reality of AI search engine systems, is that they can extract text, detect logos, understand context, and even infer brand sentiment or spam signals from visual content. Search engines are moving beyond filenames and alt text. It’s reading embedded text, interpreting the subject matter, and treating some images as searchable, indexable content.

We don't know how far Google or Bing have taken that, or if it is even really worth their bother. We first heard about SE"s reading images clear back in 2005 when it came out at Pubcon that SE's could detect adult content images by the "hue" of an image that was approximately near human skin tones.

The TikTok competition has pushed Google into realms they never considered part of search before. Google is now featuring a "Short Videos" tab along with "Videos". Some of that content under there is from Instagram. Steve Wiideman of Wiideman Consulting. says, "[a client] marries their newsletter to their blog posts, and leverages their podcast... They know their audience lives on social media and their content needs to be discoverable."

SEO Implications to Watch

• If you’re hiding text in images to bypass filters (like affiliate links or price claims), that’s not going to fly much longer.
• If you’re using screenshots with sensitive info (client dashboards, ad spend numbers, private logins), they may be quietly indexed and parsed.
• If your images contain visual clues that contradict your on-page claims, AI can detect that dissonance.
• Captions: Google will - and can read them. So even your audio script for videos needs to be keyword rich.

If Instagram posts are being indexed and associated with your site or brand, there may be bonus long-term value in reinforcing various entity relationships through structured data like sameAs, ImageObject, and VideoObject.

• Update schema markup on your site to reference your Instagram profile using sameAs. For video-heavy accounts, consider implementing VideoObject schema that mirrors your social video content when embedded or discussed on your site.
• Your Instagram presence, if consistently tied to a known brand or individual, could reinforce your E-E-A-T profile, especially when content themes align across web and social. There is no reason not to assume Google isn't going to tie identity, authorship, and/or brand to Insta profiles. Remember, Google is also indexing LinkedIn, so indexing Insta gives them a new data point for the cache of data treasure they use to produce indexing.
• In your Insta posts use Keyword-Rich Captions and alt-text: Write descriptive captions that include relevant keywords your target audience might search for on Google, such as “2025 wedding dress trends” or “vegan recipes Seattle.” Place primary seo kw's naturally within the first 125 chars for max impact.
• Hashtags: use up to 5 quality hashtags. Seems to be best if you go long tail with this and avoid the big generic keywords. This isn't about clickablity or searchability anymore, this is about indexing. This is the same as metadata.
• Location Tags: Targeting local? Go all out on local hashtags and keywords. These will most often help your AIO as well.
• Bio: fill it out like it was a mini-webpage and give it the full optimization treatment. This helps Google understand what your account is about and can help you rank for branded searches or searches related to your expertise. Remember EEAT signals can come from just about anywhere and when Google can attach a human to an authority, they love that stuff!
• So, you have all the major variants of your domain names? It would be good to go look for all of them on Instagram. We never had to care about this before, but with the mass traffic that Insta gets (hey, it's not all foodies and teens any more), it is worth your while to check it out.
• Topical Clustering has been a hot topic the last year. Like EEAT signals, there is the possibility that branded mentions and offsite links in social content may start to influence topical clustering or discovery of new pages.
• Without UTM tagging, traffic attribution may get swallowed by “Direct” or “Referral” with little clarity. I encourage UTM tagging on all profile and bio links and monitoring. Tag everything going forward.
• Branding Branding Branding: An old SEO joke was the best place to bury a body was on page two of Google Serps. This was also true for Instagram because it didn't allow search engines to index them. So those creators or brands with licensed or questionably sensitive content may be surprised to see it surfaced publicly, possibly out of context.
• Lastly, let me remind you that we are in the AI era, and it can understand context, nuance, and credible writing (so don't try spamming your way to the top here - it'll backfire bigger than ever)

One of the best things you can do, is to start monitoring your brand on Instagram. Here are a indepth list of some of the top social monitoring tools that work on Instagram.

With Meta’s Threads also showing signs of being indexed, social platforms are inching closer to becoming prime time players in our beloved search ecosystem.

Marketers who treat social posts as standalone content assets and not just engagement fodder, will be positioned for this shift. If you're already creating high-quality Instagram content, it’s now time to think about how that content plays in search.