Beyond the search bar: what “search” actually means in 2026

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July 15, 2026

Guests: Ray Saddiq & Ashely Liddell

TL;DR

Search hasn’t shrunk: it’s spread out. People now check an average of 3.5 platforms before making a decision, and the psychology behind a search hasn’t changed, only the friction has. The brands winning right now aren’t chasing every trend; they’re mining search data across TikTok, Reddit, and Google to find product opportunities, own categories, and measure what actually matters, brand search lift, share of search, and saves over views, not just traffic.

Key takeaways

• Google now natively tracks social performance inside Search Console — a signal that social content is officially part of the search conversation, not adjacent to it.
• The fight isn’t against Google, it’s against friction. People move to whichever platform solves their pain, need, or desire fastest — the underlying psychology of search hasn’t changed.
• The average buyer checks 3.5 platforms before deciding, moving through trigger, explore, evaluate, and purchase stages that can each happen on a different platform.
• Search data reveals intent that listening data can’t — it showed a debt relief brand’s real trigger moment (a declined card at checkout) and gave BullyBillows a new product line from a single search spike.
• “Useful” content has to be entertaining, not just informative — saves, shares, and DMs are stronger signals of usefulness than views alone.
• Track brand search lift, share of search, category salience, and organic CPM over vanity metrics like raw traffic or impressions.
• Getting SEO and social teams in the same room, looking at the same dashboard, was flagged as one of the single highest-leverage changes a team can make.

Watch the full episode, now live:

Why this matters now

Google confirmed something this month that most search and social marketers had already felt coming: it started natively tracking social media performance inside Search Console. On the surface, that’s a reporting update. Underneath it, it’s an admission, Google now accepts that search doesn’t happen only on Google.

That was the starting point for a recent Search Standard conversation with Ashley Liddell, co-founder of Deviation and creator of the Search Everywhere framework, and Ray Saddiq, global head of marketing at Rise at Seven.

Both have spent their careers at the intersection of SEO and social, and the conversation covered where discovery is actually happening in 2026, why “search is dying” is the wrong framing, and how brands are using search data in ways that have nothing to do with rankings.

It’s not a war against Google — it’s a war against friction

The clearest reframe from the episode: people haven’t fallen out of love with search. They’ve fallen out of patience with friction.

Ten blue links, and the content required to rank on them, created a slower path to an answer than TikTok, Reddit, or Pinterest now offer. When a faster route to the same solution exists, people take it. The psychology of search hasn’t changed, the want to solve a pain, a need, or a desire is identical whether someone types into Google or TikTok. What’s changed is where the friction is lowest.

As Ray put it simply: the search bar hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved.

The new shape of a search journey

The data referenced in the episode: Ray and his team researched a study of 1.5 billion searches across platforms and found that people check an average of three and a half platforms before making a decision. That journey tends to follow four stages: trigger, explore, evaluate, purchase, and each stage can happen on a different platform entirely.

Ray put this into a worked example for the episode:

Someone planning a road trip might hit TikTok first (trigger: “LA road trip”), move to Reddit to compare options (explore: “best convertible LA”), cross-check brands, then finally search the specific brand name on Google once they’re ready to act. Attribution gets harder, but the psychological path is traceable, and increasingly, the purchase itself doesn’t happen online at all. It happens in-store, off the back of a search journey that started three platforms earlier.

Search data tells you things listening data can’t

One of the strongest threads in the conversation was about search as a research tool, not just a distribution channel. A few examples came up:

• A US debt relief brand discovered, through search behaviour, not social listening or surveys, that the real trigger moment for their audience wasn’t a vague sense of financial stress. It was the specific moment a card declines at a supermarket checkout. That’s when people start searching for help.
• BullyBillows, a premium dog accessories brand, spotted a spike in searches for “AirTag dog collar.” Rather than redesigning their whole product line, they created a 3D-printed attachment that fits over existing collars and covers competitor branding, a new product line built directly from a search signal, and one that went on to win recognition in the industry.
• Shark Ninja used search and content together to both grow and own the “LED face mask” conversation, not just capturing existing demand, but creating the category and then dominating it.
• Ninja and Red Bull were both used to illustrate “category salience” — whether people associate your brand name directly with the category itself. If someone’s asked their favourite air fryer brand and says “Ninja” without hesitation, that’s salience built over many search touchpoints, not one campaign.

The throughline: search data surfaces the version of a customer’s intent they’d never volunteer in a survey or say out loud on social. It’s less curated than what people post, and more honest.

Useful content is entertaining content

A recurring theme was pushback against the idea that “useful” search content has to be dry. The example given was a piece about long-distance running shoes: a straight “best running shoes for marathon training” post won’t rank or engage, because it has no cultural hook. But a marathon-day vlog covering the same shoes, tied to a real event like the London Marathon, performs, because it’s seasonal, reactive to a moment, and still fully optimised for the same search intent underneath.

The signal that content is genuinely useful, according to the episode, isn’t just information delivered. It’s whether people save it, share it, DM it to someone, or come back to it later. One brand’s data campaign on the slowest websites in the world was still earning backlinks two years after publication, a sign, per the guests, that the content had lasting utility rather than a 72-hour shelf life.

What to actually track

For teams wondering where to point their measurement effort, the episode landed on a few consistent signals over vanity metrics:

• Brand search lift — did the content cause people to go and search your brand name afterward?
• Share of search and category salience — are you the name people think of, not just a name they recognise?
• Organic CPM — what would this reach have cost if you’d paid for it? Useful ammunition for justifying organic investment internally.
• Saves and shares over views — the strongest indicator that content is being retained for future use, not just scrolled past.
• Average order value and conversion rate on the landing pages that content feeds into — proof the funnel is actually working, not just generating impressions.

The takeaway

Search isn’t shrinking. It’s fragmenting across more surfaces, and the brands treating social platforms as a second conversation happening away from search are already behind the ones treating it as the same conversation, just relocated. The practical shift isn’t a new tactic, it’s getting the SEO and social functions talking, sharing a dashboard, and mapping the same intent across every platform someone might actually search on.

This piece is based on a recent Search Standard episode featuring Ashley (Deviation) and Ray (Rise at Seven).