Instagram Content Now Google-Indexed: What It Means for Your Reach, SEO and Strategy

You might have seen an in-app notification, or email land in your inbox over the last few weeks, along these lines:

“We're writing to let you know that starting on 10 July 2025 search engines, such as Google and Microsoft Bing, will automatically be allowed to show all public photos and videos from your professional account in search result pages. This will help more people discover your content outside Instagram.

If you don't want your public content to appear in search engine results, you can easily turn it off in Account privacy settings.”

From today, public Instagram Business and Creator profiles will be indexed by Google. This is a huge departure from what was a closed system, which will now massively broaden discoverability, allowing Reels, posts and carousels to appear in search results.

What could it mean for your business or organisation?

Encouraging audience growth off Instagram and improving monetisation

All that amazing content you’ve written on Instagram, will now finally be discoverable organically via Google SERPs. Broadening your reach and, if you’re already in the habit of writing good quality, optimised content, then it’s quite the bonus. Those extra eyeballs on your content could drive more affiliate clicks, brand deals, leads, valuable connections and much more.

Want to capitalise on this significant shift on Instagram?

Try the following:

Switching to a public business or creator account, to ensure indexability
Optimising your captions and alt text with targeted keywords
Using strategic hashtags
Creating relevant, evergreen, search-friendly content for longer-term impact

But, like everything, there may be downsides

With SEO mattering now more than ever with this switch, we’d expect this to lead to an uptick in keyword-rich captions, alt-text and hashtags. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean an improvement in the quality of content, with LinkedIn painfully demonstrating the battle this presents in reality.

The increased competition to be ‘seen’ could mean:

More noise with less substance, through AI-generated content flooding search results
Increased pressure to optimise content, stifling and altering the authenticity and creativity of accounts
Algorithmic mismatching, with content that performs well on Instagram, not necessarily aligning with what search engines deem good content, leading to strategy challenges

Instagram could become a significant part of your SEO strategy, but we’d certainly recommend you refer back to Google’s own advice, particularly around gaining visibility in Google AI search:

“...Google wants to show content that fulfills peoples' needs. Focus on making unique, non-commodity content that visitors from Search and your own readers will find helpful and satisfying.”