Instagram SEO is the work of optimising your profile and content so they show up when someone searches for something: in the app's search bar and, since July 2025, in Google's results too. These are two different search engines with different signals, and almost every guide treats them as one.
To find out how much the second one really counts, on 3 October 2026 we pulled Google's first page on a smartphone for 24 Italian searches, from restaurants and recipes to B2B companies. An organic instagram.com result appeared in 6 of the 24 searches, and in 5 of those 6 it was a profile, not a post. Counting short-video carousels and AI answers as well, Instagram was on 13 of the 24 pages. On 10 October 2026 we ran a smaller check on Google UK, with 7 equivalent searches, and the pattern held. Below you'll find both tests, what to optimise in your profile and posts, the five-hashtag rule and how to measure the traffic Google sends you with Search Console's new feature.
Two different searches: inside the app and on Google
The first is Instagram's own search. Someone who opens Instagram and types "bakery manchester" into the search bar gets accounts, reels, posts and places chosen by Instagram's algorithm, which knows who they follow and what they interact with. Most of the game is played here, because Instagram is huge in the UK: according to DataReportal's Digital 2026: The United Kingdom report, Meta's advertising tools could reach 35.5 million people on Instagram in late 2025, 52.1% of UK internet users, up 3 million (+9.2%) in a year. These are ad reach figures, not monthly active users.
The second is Google, which reads Instagram's public content the way it reads any other web page and ranks it by its own criteria. Instagram's algorithm counts for nothing here: what counts is the text Google can read, the authority of the profile and how well the result answers the search. It's the same pattern we saw when we measured SEO on TikTok and SEO on LinkedIn: the platform decides who sees the content inside the app, Google decides whether and where to show it outside.
One detail says a lot: "instagram seo" gets around 140 searches a month on Google in the UK, according to Google Ads data (twelve-month average, extracted with DataForSEO on 10 October 2026). That's very few for a topic that affects hundreds of thousands of businesses. People who run a profile mostly look for answers on social media itself.
How search works inside Instagram
Instagram has explained its search engine in detail only once, in an official post from August 2021. There are three signals, in this order:
- the search text, which Instagram calls "by far the most important signal": the words typed are matched against username, profile name, bio, captions, hashtags and places;
- the searcher's activity: the accounts they follow, the posts they've viewed, their past interactions;
- the result's popularity signals: clicks, likes, shares and followers.
In the same post Instagram gives a practical tip that many guides still ignore: keywords and hashtags belong in the caption, not in the comments. It also says that accounts that post spam can be pushed lower in the results, to the point of only appearing if someone types the full username.
The first signal is the only one you fully control, which is why Instagram SEO largely comes down to one question: do the words your customer would type appear in the fields Instagram reads? It's the same job as classic keyword research, with a more conversational vocabulary.
What changed on 10 July 2025
Until summer 2025 Instagram asked search engines not to index photos and videos from posts. Since 10 July 2025, public content from professional accounts (business and creator) belonging to adults can appear in Google and Bing results: photos, carousels, videos and reels, with the text that goes with them.
The setting is switched on automatically for eligible accounts. You'll find it under Settings, Account privacy, in the option that allows public photos and videos to appear in search engine results. If you want to remove a piece of content from Google, the procedure is in Instagram's Help Centre. Private profiles and personal accounts remain excluded.
Before any other optimisation, then, it's worth making three checks: that the account is professional, that it's public and that the option hasn't been switched off. A private profile doesn't appear on Google and only shows its name in Instagram's own search.
The test: how much room Instagram gets on Google
On 3 October 2026 we pulled Google's first page for 24 searches, with location Italy, Italian language and mobile device, in five groups: local businesses, inspiration searches, practical questions, brand and people names, B2B services. For each page we recorded whether an instagram.com URL appeared among the organic results, in which position and in what format, and whether Instagram was present in other parts of the page: the "Short videos" carousel, the sources cited in the AI Overview, related sites.
| Search group | Searches | Instagram in organic results | Instagram anywhere on the page | Most frequent social network in organic results |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local businesses | 6 | 2 | 4 | Facebook (4 searches) |
| Inspiration | 6 | 1 | 3 | Pinterest (4 searches) |
| Practical questions | 4 | 0 | 3 | YouTube (4 searches) |
| Brands and people | 4 | 3 | 3 | Instagram (3 searches) |
| B2B services | 4 | 0 | 0 | none |
| Total | 24 | 6 | 13 |
The searches, translated here from the Italian originals (brand and personal names unchanged), for anyone who wants to repeat the test: sushi restaurant Milan, hairdresser Rome, pastry shop Naples, gym Turin, wedding photographer Florence, wedding planner Puglia (local); women's spring outfits, wedding favour ideas, small tattoos meaning, small living room furniture, autumn gel nail colours, quick pasta recipes (inspiration); how to make bread at home, ab exercises at home, what to see in Matera, how to make Neapolitan pizza (practical questions); Iginio Massari, Pasticceria Marchesi, Chiara Ferragni, Eataly (brands and people); packaging machines, management software for small businesses, SEO consultant Milan, metal fabrication Lombardy (B2B).
These are the six cases where Instagram made it into the organic results:
| Search (translated) | Position among organic results | URL type |
|---|---|---|
| wedding planner Puglia | 2 | a wedding planner's profile |
| Pasticceria Marchesi | 2 | @marchesi1824 profile |
| small tattoos meaning | 2 | reel |
| Iginio Massari | 3 | @iginio.massari profile |
| Eataly | 5 | @eataly profile |
| pastry shop Naples | 10 | profile of a pastry shop whose username matches the search |
Three things emerge from the numbers.
On Google it's the profile that ranks, not the post. Five of the six organic results are profile pages, and three of them answer a search for the brand name. The Instagram profile works like a second official page: it appears next to the website, the Google Business Profile listing and the Facebook page when someone searches for you by name. The "pastry shop Naples" case shows the flip side: a profile whose username was identical to the search reached tenth position even though the shop was in Maiori, on the Amalfi Coast, a sign that Google gives a lot of weight to the text of the name. The UK check pointed the same way: for "ottolenghi" the @ottolenghi_restaurants profile was second among the organic results, and for "dishoom" an Instagram location page was seventh.
Outside brand searches, Instagram gets in through video. In 7 of the 24 Italian searches Instagram reels were in the "Short videos" carousel, often more than one: 6 out of 10 for "sushi restaurant Milan", 4 out of 10 for "what to see in Matera". In inspiration searches the organic results belonged to Pinterest instead, and in practical ones to YouTube. Photos and carousels never appeared. In the UK check the split was the same: for "small tattoos with meaning" the organic results were Pinterest's and Instagram had 2 reels out of 10 in the carousel, plus a photo post in the image pack, the only /p/ URL we saw in either test; for "how to make bread at home" the videos were YouTube's.
AI answers rarely cite it. The AI Overview appeared in 5 of the 24 Italian searches and cited an Instagram reel in 2, for tattoos and for homemade bread. In both cases the source was a video, not a profile. In the UK check the AI Overview appeared for "how to make bread at home" and "packaging machines" and cited no Instagram content.
The limits need saying: the Italian test is a single extraction, on a single day, on a small sample, and the UK check (7 mobile searches on 10 October 2026: sushi restaurant london, wedding planner cotswolds, small tattoos with meaning, dishoom, ottolenghi, how to make bread at home, packaging machines) is smaller still. SERPs change from one hour to the next and from one city to another, as we saw when we pulled the same LinkedIn searches twice. The ratios between the groups, though, are clear in both markets.
Profile: name, username and bio
The profile is what Instagram reads first and what Google shows most often, so it's the work with the highest return.
- Username. It's the profile's address and the first text Google reads. If the brand is already well known, the brand is fine; if it's a little-known local business, a username containing the category or the town helps, as the pastry shop in tenth position shows.
- Profile name. It's a separate field from the username and it's read by Instagram's own search. Here it pays to put the word that describes the service next to the brand: "Sarah Jones | Wedding photographer Bristol" can also be found by people who've never heard of Sarah Jones.
- Bio. Instagram itself suggests including relevant keywords and, if useful, the location. Write it in the customer's words, not your internal ones: "solar panels for businesses" rather than "integrated energy solutions".
- Category and contact details. A professional account lets you choose a category and show an address and contact details. For a local business this is information that keeps the profile consistent with your Google listing and your website.
A common mistake is to stuff the name and bio with keywords in a row. In Instagram's own search it may give you something in the short term, but on Google it's keyword stuffing, and to readers it's a profile that looks like spam, which is exactly the category Instagram says it pushes down.
Captions, on-screen text and subtitles
The caption is the text that Instagram and Google are sure to read. Two practical tips:
- put the keyword in the first line, which is also the one visible without opening the post;
- describe what's in the picture and where, with proper names: "pistachio croissant, bakery on Deansgate in Manchester" carries more information than "the treat you've been waiting for".
In reels, what's said and written inside the video counts too. Subtitles are first of all for people watching without sound, and they also make the content readable to whoever is ranking it. On-screen text in the first few seconds does the same job as a headline.
How much does writing for search rather than for hashtags pay off? The only public experiment we've found is by Hootsuite: in July 2022 Stacey McLachlan published ten posts on a personal account, five with captions built around keywords and five with hashtags only. The keyword posts got 30% more reach; on the beaches theme, for example, 379 accounts reached against 216. It's a small test, North American and four years old: treat it as a hint, not a rule.
Hashtags: five at most
Since 19 December 2025 Instagram has limited hashtags to five per post or reel, down from the thirty allowed before. The announcement came from Instagram's @creators account on Threads, with an explicit reason: a few targeted hashtags work better than lots of generic ones. Tags like #reels or #explore don't help distribution.
Guides written before December 2025 still talk about a maximum of 30 hashtags per post, and some of them still rank. Today that's advice the platform won't even let you follow. The hashtag has stayed a label that tells Instagram what the content is about: choose them the way you'd choose a product category, one for the topic, one for the place, one for the format, and leave alone the ones with millions of posts, where a piece of content disappears within minutes.
Alt text and location
Instagram generates alt text for photos on its own, using object recognition, but the result is generic. Instagram's Help Centre explains how to edit it and replace it with your own. It's first of all for people using a screen reader, and the rules for writing it are the same as for alt text on your website: describe what's in the image, in one sentence, without lists of keywords.
The location tagged on a post links the content to a location page that Instagram uses in search (on Google UK, an Instagram location page for Dishoom London ranked seventh for "dishoom"). For a business that works in one city it's the easiest signal to add. To appear in Google Maps, though, it isn't enough: there what counts is your listing and the local pack, as we explain in our guide to local SEO.
How to measure it: Search Console now reads Instagram too
Until a few months ago the traffic Google sent to an Instagram profile was invisible. In July 2026 Google opened Search Console's platform properties to everyone, as explained on the Google Search Central blog: you can connect an Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube account and see clicks, impressions, CTR, average position and the searches for which your posts and profile appeared on Google.
In August 2026 we started connecting them for our clients. The process requires the social account's credentials, accepting the terms and about 48 hours before the first data appears. The report is built like the classic Google Search Console one, with an insights section and an achievements section, and permissions are managed the same way, with owner, full access and read-only.
The limit is clear: it only measures what happens on Google. Views inside the app stay in Instagram's insights. Put together, the two sources answer a question that used to have no numbers: how many people reach your profile because they searched for it on Google?
Who it doesn't work for
In the four B2B searches of the Italian test no social network appeared in the organic results, neither Instagram nor any other, and on Google UK "packaging machines" gave the same result. If you sell machinery, management software or industrial processing, you won't find customers through Instagram SEO: buyers search on Google and land on websites, product pages and trade portals. For these companies Instagram remains a brand channel, worth keeping tidy because it appears when someone searches for the company name, not an acquisition channel from search.
At the other end, for restaurants, bakeries, photographers, wedding planners and anyone working on visual inspiration, the profile can reach the top results when someone searches for the name or the category in an area, as happened to the wedding planner from Puglia in second position, and reels take up the video space. There, optimisation pays off in concrete terms. The overall picture of how social media affects rankings is in our guide to social media and SEO.
Instagram SEO FAQs
It depends on the search. In our test of 24 Italian searches an organic Instagram result appeared in 6, almost always a profile searched for by name; a smaller UK check found the same pattern, with @ottolenghi_restaurants second for "ottolenghi". For inspiration searches and practical questions Instagram mostly appears in the short-video carousel, and for B2B searches it never appeared.
You need a professional account (business or creator), public, belonging to an adult, with the option that allows public photos and videos to appear in search engines switched on under Settings, Account privacy. After that, what matters are the username, profile name and bio, which are the text Google reads.
Five at most per post or reel. Instagram announced the limit on 19 December 2025; before that you could use thirty. Choose ones that are relevant to the content and avoid generic tags like #reels or #explore.
In the caption. Instagram said so itself in its official 2021 post on search: keywords and hashtags belong in the caption, not in the comments.
With Google Search Console platform properties, available to everyone since July 2026. You connect your Instagram account and after about 48 hours you can see clicks, impressions, average position and the searches for which your profile and posts appeared on Google.
Yes, but it's first of all about accessibility. Instagram generates a generic automatic one; replacing it with a sentence that describes what's in the image helps people using a screen reader and gives whoever ranks the content more text to read.
One last observation from the tests. On Google, Instagram wins almost only when someone is already searching for your name: Massari, Marchesi and Eataly in Italy, Ottolenghi in the UK. That means the profile doesn't create new demand from Google, it collects it. The Instagram SEO that pays off most is therefore also the least talked about: growing the number of people who search for the brand, which is brand SEO work, and making sure that when they do, they find a profile with the right name, a clear bio and this week's latest reel. If you want to know how much searches for your brand weigh today and where they leak, that's where we start in our SEO consulting projects.
