Instagram Expands Google Access to Public Posts to More Regions

A quick note of clarity here: Over the past week, several people have emailed me asking why SMT isn’t covering Instagram’s shift to enabling all posts to be indexed by Google, which some have suggested is a major change in content discoverability.

And the reason is, it’s actually not. This isn’t actually a major shift, because most public IG posts have been indexed by Google for some time. Go do a Google search and you’ll get IG posts in the SERP, this is not new for most regions, though Instagram is rolling this out to more places over time.

To explain: Recently, some users got this notification on Instagram, informing them that their posts would soon be indexable by the big G.

So from July 10th, which was last Thursday, Instagram implemented a change to the way that some IG posts are being made available to Google.

That notification then prompted expanded discussion within social media communities about the implications of this, and how it could be a big change to the way in which your IG content is discovered, exposed, etc.  

But it isn’t.

As per Instagram’s Help Center documentation:

“Instagram generally requests that search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing do not index the content of users’ photos and videos from stories, reels, posts, and highlights. However, we allow search engines to index photos and videos from public reels and posts that were uploaded or posted from January 1, 2020 onwards from accounts that meet [certain] criteria.”

Basically, if the account holder is over 18, Google can already crawl their public posts, which is the way it has been in most regions for some time.

But not all regions.

I asked Instagram for clarification on this, and they confirmed that this is being gradually rolled out around the world, but for most regions, this is already the norm, and has been for several years.

The idea is that this will help to give more exposure to creators and businesses. And again, this has been the case for some time.

So nothing to see here, really, unless you’ve specifically got this notification in your own IG feed. If you have, then yes, it is new, and Google is now indexing your public posts. But for most regions, all of your public posts have been indexable for a long while.

Hopefully that clears up any confusion.