Instagram Indexing in Search
Instagram just announced a new update to how they’re using your information and the content you share on their platform, effective July 10, 2025.
Here’s why it matters and why you should care:
Instagram is making it so that content posted by public business profiles whose account holders are over 18 years old will be available to search engines for indexing. Search indexing is the process of organizing and storing information from the internet so third-party search engines can find it quickly and easily when a search query is entered.
This means that the indexed information can be shown to anyone on the internet within search engines.
In the past, Instagram has requested that search engines not index user content, including all videos and images from posts, stories, highlights, and reels. They’ve now changes their tune to allow search engines to index content posted since January 1, 2020, from certain accounts.
If you are currently over 18 years old, and have a public, professional Instagram account, your content *will* be indexed by search engines (as of July 10th).
What happens if you opt-in? (aka do nothing)
If you do nothing and let Meta index your content, anything you’ve posted will now be searchable on Google and through other search engines (yes… there are *other* search engines… we’re looking at you Bing & duckduckgo) What does it mean that your content will be used by search engines? This will now be an essential part of your SEO and social strategy. Your hashtag strategy will come into play in a much wider range of places now because search engines will now be categorizing your hashtags and captions as keywords and serving them up to people searching for those keywords.
This is HUGE for anyone who has been continuing their quest for the perfect hashtag despite social media influencers telling folks that hashtags don’t mean sh*t ANYMORE.
You will now be able to rank for keywords present on your instagram, which means you’ll have a second way to rank in search engines (outside of your website) and you’ll likely be able to capture a much wider audience on your social channels as well as *hopefully* drive more traffic to your website. That being said, this may also pull some of your web traffic from your website to your instagram instead. Keep that in mind as you work on that keyword strategy – where do you want people to go and what do you want them to do when they get there? Now, every post you make to Instagram can come up as a Google search result for queries related to your image or video content.
It’s a game-changer. The good news? This update is rolling out right around the start of a new quarter – the perfect time to reevaluate existing strategies. Now’s the time to focus on Instagram SEO. Start curating your content for wider web discoverability, not just in-app engagement.
Make sure you’re using keyword-rich captions, naming your image and video files, using captions and subtitles on videos, and saying keywords out loud in your videos. Did you know that Instagram also provides the option to add alt tags to your posts? Make sure you’re capitalizing on this by making sure that your posts have alt tag info across the board. Search engines will take this information and use it to determine if and when your content should be shown.
View this update as an opportunity to broaden your SEO campaign and increase your searchability so that you can reach more people. Want help working on your search marketing strategy and integrating Instagram SEO into your social strategy? We’re happy to help.
