It’s estimated that over 95 million photos and videos are uploaded on Instagram each day, and as of July 10th 2025, Meta made any of those posted publicly fair game for Google’s indexing. Going forward, as long as you’ve given permission, every picture you upload to Instagram will be searchable. Baked a cake for your Bichon Frisé, posted it so mum would see? Welcome to the front page of Bichon Frisé eating a Victoria Sponge’s Google search results.
Who does this apply to?
This doesn’t apply to everyone, just the vast majority, for now. The update is relevant to all content posted by account holders over 18 (certain to remain the case) on accounts that are listed as public (possibly subject to change). This means a ‘private’ user cannot currently be crawled, but it’s important to remember that ‘private’ only relates to the settings a user selects on their profile. That data is only protected by their preferences – not by their terms of agreement.
How will my photos be used?
Images and videos on Instagram will become crawlable by regular search engine users. Which means all of the data associated with the image becomes the guiding light for algorithms and AIs looking to source a relevant answer to a user’s search query. Captions, hashtags and alt text will all be used to build the most accurate understanding of what your photo consists of and then deliver it to the users searching for it.
What does this mean for SEO and marketing?
Digital marketers can now think of every Instagram post as a potential landing page. And that means Instagram posts need to be working harder than ever before. Captions will benefit from SEO, tags will become fundamental, as will hashtags and alt text. Fundamentally, this is good news for marketers, as it opens up a massive opportunity for social posts to gain reach beyond their platforms.
How to make use of this as a digital marketer?
If you’re a brand, creator or digital marketer, you’ll naturally want to start making the most of this change as soon as possible. With that in mind, here are our top four tips for optimising the visibility of Instagram posts:
- Geotag your location
Local searches inputted into Google will now reveal Instagram posts in the same location. The search ‘brunch near me’ will now crawl individual photos people have uploaded of brunch spots within the user’s location, provided they are correctly geotagged.
- Use three to five targeted hashtags
Hashtags now have completely new reach and visibility. Because of that, they need to be carefully considered, arguably more from an SEO sense than from their validity and relevance for Instagram itself.
- Add keywords everywhere you can
Google is able to pick up keywords from everywhere. So, it’s now essential to have keywords in your supporting text, but also in your captions and the actual voice-over itself, where it will pick up certain key phrases spoken aloud.
- Keywords even belong in your username and bio
Seriously, everywhere. Google will crawl every relevant photo, but it will also take notice of the usernames and bios of the accounts that uploaded those images. If you’re a brunch place, you’ll want to have brunch in your username, plus a bio explaining why you’re the best brunch in town.
And if you’re interested in hearing more of the secret goings-on of the digital marketing world, you can follow our podcast series, Inside Voices. In our latest episode, Insights Partner Joe Hepburn, and Senior Performance Marketing Manager Mundip Chaggar, discuss Reddit jumping to page one of almost every Google search, and the quiet deal that made it happen.
