Social search and AI visibility: 2026 data on how consumers discover brands

A shopper looking for running shoes watches a creator’s review, searches the model name, reads a Reddit thread, and asks an AI assistant to compare the last two pairs. The retailer’s analytics records a single visit and a sale. Emplifi and Semrush, an Adobe company, built the 2026 Social Search and AI Visibility Report to measure the steps that analytics never sees.

This guide covers the headline findings on social commerce, Reddit, and AI search, and the actions that follow from them. For the practitioner playbook from our joint webinar, read our guide to AI visibility through social media.

Is social search replacing search engines?

Social platforms lead gift-idea discovery, while search engines still lead product research. Shoppers use each for a different job, so a brand that plans for both reaches them at two moments.

Nearly four in 10 consumers rank social platforms among their top three sources for gift ideas, ahead of retail websites (21%), in-store browsing (15%), and search engines (4%). Search engines move to the top once a shopper starts researching a specific product online.

Source: Emplifi consumer survey, US and UK, April to May 2026.

Shoppers form intent on social and refine it on search. A skincare shopper who sees a routine on TikTok still types the product name into Google to check ingredients and price, so the brand needs a findable video and a page that answers the follow-up question.

Captions, spoken words, on-screen text, and hashtags decide whether that video surfaces in TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube search. Our guide to social search optimization covers the mechanics platform by platform.

Social referral traffic to retail is steady at about 100 million visits a month across 30 leading US retail domains, a level Semrush has tracked for three years. For a retailer planning next year’s budget, that makes social a dependable acquisition channel to report beside organic search.

Which social platforms drive social commerce, and which drive clicks?

TikTok and Instagram turn discovery into purchases inside their own apps, while Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit send the most shoppers out to retail sites. More than six in 10 consumers have already bought through a social platform.

TikTok has the widest gap between purchases and clicks: the strongest purchase figures of any platform and the smallest share of retail referral traffic.

Sources: Emplifi consumer survey, US and UK, April to May 2026; Semrush first-party referral data. Referral shares are traffic-weighted across an eight-retailer US basket in June 2026, which tilts them toward Amazon, where YouTube and Facebook referrals dominate. A simple per-retailer average lifts Reddit, Pinterest, and Instagram and lowers YouTube.

Reddit stands out in that table. It sends more retail referral traffic than Instagram, X, and TikTok combined, yet many brands have little or no presence there.

The two models need different scorecards. Facebook and YouTube work as referral engines, sending high-intent traffic to retail sites through reviews, demonstrations, and affiliate content. TikTok and Instagram create their commercial value inside the app, where clicks undercount the sale.

Why do consumers add “Reddit” to their searches?

Consumers add “Reddit” to product searches to reach human opinions, and the habit is common. More than one in four consumers (26%) deliberately append the word to product searches.

Reddit users treat the platform as a research step: 73% search Reddit before making a purchase, and 85% trust its product recommendations. Product reviews (66%), real customer experiences (59%), and brand comparisons (40%) are what they look for most.

Search engines are sending far more shoppers to Reddit. Search referrals to Reddit have tripled since 2023 to 1.31 billion monthly US visits, according to Semrush.

The search fork: “best [X]” vs “[X] Reddit”

High-volume research queries such as “best headphones” trigger a Google AI Overview, while the same category with “Reddit” added does not. Semrush keyword data shows the split in all four categories it analyzed.

Source: Semrush Keyword Analytics, US Google database, September 2026.

A shopper who types “mattress Reddit” has skipped the AI summary on purpose and wants a verdict from people who sleep on the product. AI systems read the same threads: AI-referred visits to Reddit grew 76 times between 2023 and 2026, and Reddit is the third most-mentioned brand across four major AI platforms, according to Semrush.

Fernando Angulo, Senior Market Research Manager at Semrush, said in our joint webinar that nobody can manufacture those conversations: “Conversations are real, and Reddit keeps it real.” Stephen Adams, Director of Digital and AI Marketing Enablement at Emplifi, opened the same session with his own version of the habit, asking ChatGPT to check Reddit reviews before he bought a screen protector.

Stephen Adams, Emplifi, traces a purchase from a TikTok video to Google, then to a ChatGPT prompt that asked for Reddit reviews, then to Amazon.

Start with a simple audit: search “[your category] Reddit” and “[your brand] Reddit” and read what shoppers find. Our guide to building a Reddit marketing strategy covers how brands earn a place in those communities.

Social listening turns that audit into a habit by tracking the threads, complaints, and comparisons that shape your category before they surface in search results or AI answers. Our guide to using Reddit for social listening walks through the setup.

How is AI changing product research?

AI tools now sit between discovery and purchase, where shoppers use them to compare, summarize, and shortlist. One in four consumers uses AI tools frequently for product research. Their most common tasks:

• Comparing products (46%)
• Finding ideas (43%)
• Finding deals (36%)
• Summarizing reviews (35%)

Combined US visits to the five leading large language model platforms reached 1.33 billion a month in June 2026, up from roughly 2.3 million in June 2023, according to Semrush.

Across 30 leading US ecommerce domains, AI-referred visits rose from 44,000 a month in June 2023 to 8.4 million in June 2026. For a home goods retailer that reports only social and organic search, that leaves a channel that grew 190 times in three years off the dashboard.

Query type decides whether Google shows an AI Overview. In a Semrush sample of 50 US commercial and product queries, research and comparison queries such as “best [product]” triggered an AI Overview every time, while “buy” and “near me” queries did not. Brands whose product content is not structured to be surfaced, cited, or recommended in those answers lose visibility before the shopper reaches the point of purchase.

Since October 2024, commercial-intent queries have risen from 8.15% to 18.57% of the keywords that trigger an AI Overview, according to Semrush’s AI Overviews study of more than 10 million keywords. Google is extending AI answers into the research moments where brands win consideration.

Angulo summed up the change for SEO teams in the webinar: “Prompting is another way to search.” His advice was to widen the scope of SEO to include the questions shoppers type into AI assistants, because those answers name brands and cite sources.

Fernando Angulo, Semrush, explains why AI search rewards brands that are mentioned and cited across platforms over brands that rank for a single keyword.

What should brands do about social search and AI visibility?

Plan social, search, and AI as one discovery strategy, then measure it with a shared scoreboard. Five principles turn the findings above into action, and each closes with the part of the work Emplifi supports.

1. Treat search and social as a single discovery strategy

Audit captions, hashtags, and product content so they surface in TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube search as well as in feeds. Build functional content around why people search social: solving problems, comparing products, and finding deals. Shift SEO upstream to the questions shoppers ask before they are ready to buy, and give SEO and social a shared brief for each recurring question.

A running-shoe brand that keeps hearing “are these good for flat feet?” in comments should answer it in a short video, on the product page FAQ, and in a structured guide AI systems can quote. Stephen Adams calls that approach “content built to travel.”

Stephen Adams, Emplifi, shows how a customer question becomes a short video for the feed, a Q&A page for the results page, and a sourced answer for AI engines.

Emplifi Publisher groups content under a shared brief and timeline in Campaigns, with UTM tracking built in, so the video, the FAQ, and the guide ship on the same plan.

2. Measure visibility beyond rankings

Track social referral traffic alongside organic search in your attribution model, and add AI referral, Reddit presence, AI mentions, citations, and AI Overview presence beside traditional rankings. Measure TikTok by in-app purchases and engagement, and measure Facebook and YouTube by the high-intent traffic they send to product pages. Benchmark social performance against your industry with the Social Media Benchmarks 2026 report.

Emplifi Unified Analytics consolidates social, commerce, and care metrics into a single source of truth, so in-app sales and referral traffic sit in the same view.

3. Earn trust where consumers validate decisions

Treat Reddit as a discovery channel alongside community management, and check what shoppers see when they search your category and brand with “Reddit” added. Encourage authentic customer conversations and expert participation instead of relying on brand-owned content alone. Ranking for “best [X]” is part of the journey; trusted community conversations are part of modern search visibility too. Emplifi Listening tracks sentiment, trends, and risk signals across every major social channel, news source, and online community.

4. Structure content for AI retrieval

Make product content AI-readable with rich product data, reviews, user-generated content, FAQs, and expert content, and put the direct answer in the first lines of each page. Publish comparisons as tables with specs, price, and review highlights, because research and comparison queries are where AI Overviews appear.

Check each priority product page against the questions shoppers ask in comments, reviews, and Reddit threads, and close any gap where the page cannot answer a comparison question in its first lines. Emplifi Ratings & Reviews collects verified reviews with zero-click submission and syndicates them to Walmart, Google Shopping, and hundreds of other retail partners.

5. Combine SEO, social, and AI work into a unified strategy

Shared strategy, shared measurement, and shared ownership keep a brand visible at every layer of discovery. In Semrush’s operational gap study of 481 marketers, 81% of teams with fully integrated SEO and AI search execution reported more traffic or leads connected to AI platforms, compared with 36% of teams running them separately.

Hold a weekly review where SEO and social bring the top questions from search data, comments, DMs, and Reddit threads. Pick the questions that appear on both lists, agree which page, post, or FAQ answers each, and check the following week whether rankings, referrals, and AI mentions moved. Emplifi Fuel runs social marketing, commerce, and care on a single data model, and Emplifi Listening connects listening signals directly to publishing and customer care workflows.

Watch: Emplifi and Semrush on winning AI visibility

In the August 2026 webinar “Winning AI visibility: Why social and SEO must work together,” Stephen Adams of Emplifi and Fernando Angulo of Semrush walk through how discovery split across search, social, and AI. They cover what to track, from AI referral traffic to brand mentions and citations, and the three habits connected teams share: listen together, measure together, and build content that travels.

Watch the webinar on demand. Questions the speakers did not reach live are answered in the follow-up Q&A with Semrush.

Methodology: Emplifi surveyed 1,638 consumers in the US and UK with Alchemer from April 14 to May 1, 2026. Semrush figures are modeled estimates from its US traffic, keyword, and AI Overview data, sampled from June 2023 to September 2026.