As you may already know, Google recently Updated Search Console to allow brands to track the performance of their social media and video posts in search results.
Most marketers consider this update a useful freebie. They think Google wants to reward brands that create a strong footprint on TikTok, YouTube and X. And not wanting to be the glass half full, I think this is the positive outlook Google was hoping for.
If you look beyond the official announcements, a different picture emerges; this update is a clever trap. It serves as a shield to hide the traffic loss caused by artificial intelligence while incentivizing creators to continue training on Google’s AI models.
Redefining success in the age of lost clicks
To understand this strategy, we must look at the crisis that Google is facing with web publishers.
Generative research experiments and AI summaries answer user questions right on the search page. This configuration keeps users on Google instead of sending them to external websites.
Organic traffic to a company’s website was the primary metric of marketing success and a narrative that we, as an industry, pinned for years on whether or not we justified our budgets.
By tracking social media views in Search Console, Google is attempting to change the definition of success. If your website traffic drops by a third, Google may point to your social media data. They can show you that your TikTok videos received thousands of impressions on the search page; they want you to believe that you always win, even if you don’t get real clicks.
This forces marketers to view Google as the central control room for all visibility, even when Google stops sending visitors to their websites because they continue to provide visibility.
Outsourcing the search graph to creators
The update also serves as a tool to train Google’s artificial intelligence and to power generative search, Google needs to understand the real world.
The engine maps the relationships between people, brands and topics. This process is called entity resolution.
Google needs to know who an expert is, what they’re writing about, and whether they’re a real person or just an automated spam site.
By encouraging you to check your social accounts in Search Console, Google is forcing you to do its job. You provide them with the exact connections they need, you tell them that your website, your X profile, and your TikTok account are all the same entity.
Instead of Google guessing which profile belongs to which author, publishers hand-deliver verified ID cards. Google can then use this clean data to train its language models on real authorities.
This Search Console update also integrates seamlessly with the initial release of Google Search Profileswhich looks like a modern version of benefits of Google+ authorship.
The human trust filter
Having verified data is essential in the age of generative text.
Anyone can build a website, buy a repository domain, programmatically generate thousands of articles with AI, and inflate third-party authority metrics.
Social profiles with real human engagement are the best proof of life. Real businesses and brands operate across multiple channels and have some form of momentum and presence outside of their single web domain.
Google uses these connections as a trust filter to separate real brands from synthetic spam. You give Google the exact shots it needs to verify content ownership. This helps Google decide which sources are trustworthy and which are junk.
Looking at this cynically, the ability to verify social profiles in Google Search Console is a master class in optics for platform survival.
This appeases publishers somewhat by giving them new vanity metrics to track, and at the same time, it creates a new network for those same publishers to map the entity relationships that Google needs to build its AI future.
How Google Gets Social Content
Google integrates social media posts into search engine results pages using a combination of live data, standard web crawling, and dynamic JavaScript rendering. The process differs depending on the specific platform and users’ privacy settings.
Some of these data pipelines have been around for almost a decade, with the Firehose X deal (then Twitter) came into play in 2015.
This does not mean that new messages are the only ones taken into account. In my own Search Console profile, I see X posts receiving clicks on Google that I published in October 2024.
LLMs behave similarly and for this reason we need to consider a post-depreciation strategy.
While reviewing pricing prompts for one of our clients, I discovered that a few LLMs were returning pricing information from a post
Your audience, the Google platform
The brands that will win in this new landscape will not focus on these new Google metrics, but will understand that they are now another piece of the puzzle.
We need to stop treating Google as a neutral partner, because Google needs search to drive people to the advertising platform.
We should use our social networks to establish a direct connection with your audience. Gather your community on platforms that you control, rather than on a search engine that wants to keep your visitors for itself.
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Featured image: Beast01/Shutterstock
