Google in talks with Instagram and TikTok to index their video content

According to a new industry report, Google is holding talks with Instagram and TikTok to index their content in search results. The search engine giant is trying to negotiate a deal with Facebook and ByteDance, the parent companies of Instagram and TikTok respectively.

As per the report by The Information, Google wants to index and rank video content from Instagram and the fasting-growing social media platform, TikTok. This is something very similar to the partnership between Google and Twitter formed in 2015, which allows the search engine to index and rank tweets from the microblogging site immediately.

If Instagram and TikTok grant their permission, then you could be looking at their respective content in search results exactly the way you look at tweets there every day.

However, Google is being very tight-lipped about the whole deal and this is what a spokesperson had to say to The Information – “We help sites make their content discoverable and benefit from being found on Google, and they can choose how or whether their content appears in Search.”

Taking Google’s spokesperson’s word for it, it really is a ‘choice’ for content publishers to appear in the search results. But this is simply an offer nobody can refuse. The Google-Twitter deal, for example, has the search engine shelling out an annual license fee to index the tweets in the search result.

Instagram and TikTok will most probably be looking at a similar payout. It is also to be noted that Google-owned YouTube forayed into the short video segment earlier this year and competes with Instagram and TikTok in the same domain. Now Instagram and TikTok shouldn’t really be reluctant about the deal since they could land up a fair advantage with the indexing.

At the moment, Instagram or TikTok videos can’t be accessed through Google search and if the search engine giant and the social media big shots realize the deal, it could result in soaring search volumes. In the longer run, this deal could potentially escalate the opportunities for other publishers too.

The key details of the negotiation between Google and the social media platforms are still awaited.