In 2024, a SOCi survey found 67% of 18-24 year-olds had used Instagram in the past month to look up local businesses, ahead of TikTok at 62% and Google Search at 61%. Google had already flagged the shift two years earlier, when a senior VP disclosed that internal research showed almost 40% of young Americans went to TikTok or Instagram instead of Google when deciding where to eat. Most brand content strategies are built as if neither of those numbers exist.
Instagram is no longer one place. It’s two.
The first one you know quite well. Someone picks up their phone with no agenda. They scroll, something stops them, they engage, they move on. This is the entertainment feed, and it’s where almost every brand is competing every day, fighting for two seconds of attention from someone who wasn’t looking for anything, or someone who has some set preferences and taste.
The second use case has been growing quietly alongside it. Someone opens Instagram and goes straight to search. “Best places to stay in Goa.” “Does that restaurant actually look like the photos?” “What does that skincare product actually do after 30 days of real use?” They didn’t open the app to scroll. They came with a question. These are people mid-decision, closer to acting on something than almost any other audience on the platform.
And Instagram isn’t being subtle about where this is headed. The platform has been testing AI-generated search prompts inside reels, comments, suggestions tailored to what the post is about, nudging you toward a related search without leaving the app. It’s not fully rolled out everywhere yet, but the direction is unmistakable. Instagram wants to become a place where people find things, not just a place where things find people.
Consider someone searching “best cafés in Bali” on Instagram. What surfaces isn’t the resort’s branded content that spent three days in post-production. It’s a creator’s reel with real footage, honest commentary, specific enough to actually help someone plan their trip. The brand had the budget. The creator had proof. The person searching didn’t care about the difference.
That’s the part most brands miss. Someone searching isn’t just looking for information, they’re looking for proof. Does the place actually look like this. Does the food actually taste this good. Did anyone else who went there vouch for it. A polished reel can’t answer any of that, no matter how well it’s shot, because polish isn’t evidence.
Most brand content is built around awareness. Look good, sound relevant, stay top of mind. That brief works for the entertainment feed, but it does nothing for someone who came to find something specific. A polished reel with a tagline doesn’t answer a real question. So they scroll past the brand and find the creator who did, since creators tend to be just as good at holding attention as they are at answering it.
Creators figured this out first because they live closer to what their audience is actually asking. Brands are still writing briefs for awareness while the audience has moved on to intent.
Intent-driven content answers a question someone might genuinely type. It shows the real thing rather than the polished version. It is specific enough to be useful and feels like a recommendation, not an ad. That is a different brief, a different format, and almost no brand is writing it.
But here’s the part that can’t be shortcut past a certain point. Content can be paid for, reach can be bought, but genuine, organic vouching from someone who actually had the experience is much harder to fake convincingly at scale. It gets spotted eventually, and once it does, it works against the brand instead of for it. The real brief isn’t manufacturing something that looks like proof, it’s building something worth talking about, so the proof shows up on its own.
The entertainment aspect of Instagram still matters. But if every piece of content you make is built only for passive eyes, you are invisible to a behaviour that is growing on the same platform every day.
The question is not just whether this will stop someone mid-scroll. It is whether it will show up when someone is already looking. One of those people is killing time. The other one is making a decision.
There’s a harder truth underneath all of this too. Authenticity isn’t something a PR story or an influencer post can manufacture, and no budget fixes a product or service that isn’t actually good. Instagram getting better at surfacing intent just makes that gap more visible, not less.
Sources: Prabhakar Raghavan (Google), Fortune Brainstorm Tech, July 2022; SOCi Consumer Behavior Index, 2024 (via Forbes)
“Streak helped us listen to the market and respond with positioning that hit the mark. Buland became a hit from day one.”
If someone typed what you actually offer into Instagram right now, would they find proof it holds up, or just your version of it?