Search is Crumbling. Instagram Just Blinked.

Hi there,

Good morning from sunny Hove 🙂

This week, Instagram made a significant move. From 10 July, public photos and videos on professional accounts will be indexable by search engines for the first time. It’s a sharp pivot away from their long-standing walled garden.

At first glance, it looks like a win for visibility (“more people could discover your content”).

But the timing tells a different story.

We’re living through a reset in the economics of content distribution, and the data is brutal. Earlier this month, Cloudflare’s CEO shared some of the clearest signals:

• Two years ago, Google sent 1 visit for every 2 pages it scraped

• Six months ago: 6 pages per visit

• Today: 18 pages per visit, thanks largely to AI Overviews

• OpenAI? A staggering 1,500 scrapes per visit (!)

So this isn’t generosity from Instagram. It’s defence.

Meta sees that clicks from Google are drying up, and they’re opening up just enough to catch some of the leakage while keeping users inside their ecosystem.

What this means

If your strategy still depends on “click > land > convert,” it’s already behind.

The job your customer is trying to get done hasn’t changed. They still want to learn, decide, and make progress. But how they do that is shifting fast.

Now, they get what they need from AI summaries, social feeds, and previews. Which means they don’t always click. They skim, glance, move on.

So what now?

Don’t fight for clicks. Instead, make sure your content delivers value even when it’s only partially seen - in a feed, a video short, or an AI response.

That means getting closer to the struggling moment of need, and designing around what your customer is trying to do, not what your metrics want them to do.

Try this

🧠 Audit your surface

1. Pick three of your top-performing pieces.

2. Ask: “If they never click [through], does this still help them make progress?”

If not: strip it back. Reshape it. Make it valuable at first glance.

When you shape your message around where the job starts - not just where you want it to end - you stop chasing traffic and start building real traction.

Speak soon,

Peter

P.S. Need help reshaping content for discoverability? Here’s a quick prompt:

Try rewriting just one post using that filter. You’ll be surprised what shows up.