Google search results now send a click to a brand’s website less than a third of the time. In early 2026, 68% of Google searches ended with no click to their website, up from about 60% in 2024. AI Overviews and chat-based tools like ChatGPT and Claude increasingly answer questions before anyone reaches a website.
Search discovery hasn’t disappeared; it’s moving. YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly active users and remains the platform 82% of businesses rely on for video marketing. And 49%, now say they use TikTok as a search engine, a figure that climbs to 65% among Gen Z. Accounting for video in your search strategy means meeting your audience where discovery is already happening.
Three areas where video fits in the search discovery landscape
Short-form as research, not just entertainment. Video is more than entertainment: with half of U.S. consumers and two-thirds of Gen Z using TikTok to search, short-form video has become a genuine research and discovery tool, including searching for product and service research that used to start on Google.
Social video as a search engine. YouTube started this shift, and the numbers show why: it’s estimated to handle more than 3 billion searches a month, making it the second-most-used search engine in the world behind Google itself, and 61% of users say they research products on YouTube before buying. But it’s no longer just YouTube, since July 2025, Instagram Reels, carousels, and static posts have started showing up directly in Google Search results, meaning video that used to live only inside a platform’s app now competes for the same search real estate as your website.
AI systems citing video content. As AI Overviews and chat tools pull from the web to build their answers, transcripts and structured video metadata increasingly determine whether your content is part of the source material, or invisible to it. By optimizing your video content, you give AI another resource to deliver results to your audiences.
Shifts to make in your video strategy
Turning video into a real search and discovery channel comes down to three things: what you decide to make, how you structure it so it can be found, and how you measure whether it’s working.
Map video to search intent
Start with what your audience is already searching for, not what feels timely or on-trend. The same keyword and intent research that shapes a blog content calendar applies to video: look at the questions, comparisons, and how-to searches your buyers are actually running, and let that drive what you produce.
- Treat “how to,” “best,” and “vs.” queries as video opportunities the same way you’d treat them as blog topics. Use your past wins as inspiration for videos to create.
- Repurpose long-form into short-form with intent, not by default. Each cut should be optimized for how people actually search on that platform.
Build video SEO practices
A great video that search engines and AI systems can’t read is invisible, no matter how strong the content is. Structuring video the way you’d structure a webpage, with clear keywords, descriptions, metadata, transcripts, and organization, is what determines whether it gets found at all, not hashtags.
- Treat transcripts and captions as SEO assets, not an accessibility afterthought. They are what make a video legible to search crawlers and AI systems, which allows your content to be delivered to your audience.
- Build an actual YouTube SEO practice if you don’t have one: keyword-driven titles and descriptions, chapters, and playlists organized around what your customers are searching for.
Measure how your video is performing
Add video to your reporting as a channel, not just a line item under organic or paid social.
In practice, that could mean:
- Tagging video traffic in your analytics platform the same way you’d tag organic search, rather than a metric that lives in a social dashboard.
- Track branded search volume before and after a video series launches; use UTM-tagged links in descriptions to trace video-to-site traffic.
Video isn’t competing with search. It’s becoming search.
Brands that treat video as core to how they get found, not just as content to produce, are the ones that will keep showing up as AI changes the way people search. That’s a structural shift worth getting ahead of, not reacting to later.
If you’re not sure where your video strategy stands against where discovery is actually headed, that’s a conversation worth having. Reach out to Mad Fish Digital for a look at your current search and video presence and where the gaps are.
