First thing: this is big news. From July 2025, Google can now index all Instagram content – not just what it found via links. Millions of extra posts are suddenly visible in search, giving travel brands a bigger stage to get noticed.
For many in the industry, though, it’s not a complete revolution. Public reels and posts from January 2020 onwards were often discoverable already. Nonetheless, this change ensures your content is far more likely to appear in Google results, broadening reach well beyond the Instagram app.
Why did this happen?
Google knows that it is losing some search share to ‘social search’ as users aim to find more via the social channels they use regularly. As for Instagram, it wants to increase the views and interactions that content generates. Therefore, for both parties it seems a win-win. And for now, it’s also a move that helps fend off the direct competition from the Large Language Model (LLM) AI programmes, who for now can only access Instagram data by scraping content, not having direct access to it. In time, this could be blocked and mean that Instagram content won’t feature in LLMs at all – but only time will tell.
For Google, however, it can now directly access a travel treasure trove of data to learn from and show to users, particularly the younger generation, to keep them engaged on their results pages (or Instagram’s, if people click).
What it means for travel brands
For any travel company or travel content creator on Instagram, the result is more content can be discovered on Google more often. While some feasibly would have been found previously, now all your posts, and many others who mention your brand, could potentially come up in the results for a much wider set of terms. It also means that users who don’t even use Instagram can now see and view more information without having to login – which is perhaps more important for brands focusing on mature travellers.
What to do next
If you have a presence on Instagram and haven’t thought about it through the lens of search previously, now is the time. Here are my top tips:
* Check your company page and bio to make sure that it’s up to date, relevant and follows the same footprint as your other official pages. Having a consistent name, address and postcode has been important for SEO for a long time, so review these.
* Each post is a chance to rank for a specific or niche term. If you have a beautiful image of a specific villa in a specific town, then you should include that in the post – for example, ‘five bedroom villa in Gaios’.
* If you have time, add alt text to your images to describe what they are about and update file names before uploading, to provide as much information as possible.
* Add your Instagram page to your SEO tracking tools to see how and when it gets featured in the search results.
* Do a search on Instagram for your brand name and see what comes up. If there are less favourable posts featured, these could also show up in Google. It’s worth doing an audit to minimise any negative posts where possible.
Social media has long been a part of the travel discovery journey. Now that Google fully indexes Instagram posts, travel companies have an opportunity to post regular and inspirational content that can be found on the most popular search engine in the world.
How much Google will favour content from one of its biggest competitors remains to be seen, but it’s worth making Instagram a key part of your SEO thinking to make the most of the opportunity.
