When Google’s AI answers a question, it is increasingly not reading a website. It is reading a Facebook post. New data suggests social platforms have become a core source for Google’s AI answers. Often the user never visits the platform at all.
The findings come from BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO firm. Its tool tracks roughly 300 million monthly searches. As with any single-vendor study, the numbers are BrightEdge’s own, but the direction of travel is hard to ignore.
The numbers
BrightEdge says Facebook appeared as a source in 19.5 million Google AI Overviews. Instagram appeared 877,000 times, and TikTok 78,000 times.
Put another way, the firm reckons one in 15 searches is now answered using social media. That makes Meta’s platforms, it says, the single biggest resource feeding Google’s AI answers.
