Even Google admits search moved to social
Google just built an SEO tool for your TikToks and Food Network just entered live selling
Hi friends,
Notice where everyone spent their energy this past week week. Google built a way to track how your social posts perform in search. Food Network put a trained chef on TikTok live and AliExpress leaned on creators instead of discounts.
Three companies, three different surfaces, all chasing the same thing: a bigger share of where people discover products now that discovery has scattered across every app. The catch is that discovery turned out to be the easy part.
Let's get into it.
July 14th
🔍 Google built a tool to track how your TikTok and Instagram posts perform in search
Last week, Google added platform properties to Search Console, a new account type that lets creators and brands see how their Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube posts perform in Google Search and Discover, with no website required. It reports clicks, impressions, and the queries driving traffic to individual posts, and rolls out gradually over the coming weeks.
Google's own worry is that younger users have stopped starting at Google: a Forbes Advisor and Talker Research study found 45% of Gen Z are more likely to search on social platforms than a search engine. So Google is meeting the behavior where it lives and measuring it. For operators, your social posts are now a search asset with real analytics behind them, not just an in-feed play. The content you already make is doing double duty. Start measuring it that way.
🍅 Food Network and TikTok LIVE launched a co-hosted cooking series
On July 8, Food Network and TikTok LIVE aired the first episode of a co-hosted cooking series, pairing Tournament of Champions winner Antonia Lofaso with creator Jose El Cook for an hour of tomato recipes across four TikTok accounts. Viewers voted in polls and bought food-themed gifts in the chat.
No shopping in it yet, and that is the point. Food Network is lending creators what the platform cannot manufacture: the credibility of a trained chef and a broadcast brand. Live commerce is borrowing television's trust signals, not the reverse. If your live setup is still a phone propped against a shelf, the bar just moved.
🛒 AliExpress leaned on creator livestreams instead of discounts for its Summer Sale
AliExpress started reporting back on its June Summer Sale, and the choice was strategic, not promotional. Instead of leading with price, it built the event around creator-led livestreams and Brand+, its channel for authenticated brands, using more than 100 creators across 14 countries. US country manager Chris Gu framed livestreaming as adding discovery and trust at once. Those are the company's own words about its own campaign, and results are still being tallied, so treat them as directional.
The tell is what AliExpress measures: traffic, engagement, retention, and brand mentions alongside sales, not GMV alone. A platform whose US identity was built on being cheapest is now trying to buy trust, and it has decided creators are the currency. The cheapest catalog in America thinks its problem is credibility, not price. If that is AliExpress's problem, it is probably yours too.
🎤 Seller Spotlight
What $14 million in live sales taught one TikTok Shop insider
Jason Termechi spent nearly 18 months as a Live Seller Account Manager at TikTok Shop, where he says he helped generate more than $14 million in live GMV across 30-plus fashion and small-business sellers. That figure is his own, from his time inside the platform, so read it as a claim rather than an audited number. He left last October to start a consultancy, on the bet that demand for live commerce expertise now outruns what TikTok's own account managers can supply.
His advice is refreshingly unglamorous. Live selling, he argues, is won on preparation, not production: product selection, pricing, scripting, and the data you read afterward. Three points are worth stealing.
First, build a functioning TikTok Shop before you go live, because the algorithm learns who your buyer is from purchase history and shop score, and a brand with no sales record is asking to be surfaced before it has proven it can serve anyone.
Second, know that TikTok currently favors auction-based sellers in live traffic because they convert faster, so a new brand running flash sales starts at a disadvantage.
Third, watch GPM, gross merchandise value per thousand impressions: above six means the stream is converting and just needs more eyeballs, not a new strategy.
The through-line is the same one running through this whole issue. Live rewards operators who treat it as a discipline, not a stunt.
🧠 Brand Move of the Week
Crocs turned a TikTok shopping trip into a seven-episode sitcom
Crocs became the first US footwear brand to build shoppable product tags directly into a scripted series. Déjà Shoe, a seven-episode microdrama made with creator commerce agency SuperOrdinary, follows an aspiring stylist stuck reliving a chaotic first day at a fashion company, with Crocs styles tagged for purchase inside the episodes. It premiered June 16 and was produced in under four weeks. The first-footwear-brand claim comes from SuperOrdinary, which sells this exact service, though independent coverage backs up the format's momentum.
@crocsshop_us Today's the day everything changes... right? | Déjà Shoe Ep 1: The Perfect Fit Catch the rest of Déjà Shoe, starring @Paige Gallagher as E... See more
Why it works is the mechanic, not the novelty. The shopping is native to the story instead of bolted onto it, which is the same insight behind every good piece of branded content: people do not skip what they chose to watch. And the format is having a real moment. Time spent in short-drama apps rose 5.78 billion hours year over year in 2025, per Sensor Tower, and brands from JCPenney to Marc Jacobs to Dr Pepper are now producing them. JCPenney's micronovela with TelevisaUnivision drove over 16 million impressions.
Crocs also has the numbers to make the bet rational. Third-party estimates from Kalodata put it eighth among TikTok Shop's top-revenue shops in April, at $6.35 million in monthly revenue and a $39.05 average order. Ensemble's Ian Schafer had the sharpest framing of the format: it sits somewhere between live shopping and the old promise to shop the look. Which is the quiet theme again. Recorded commerce is trying to buy back the intimacy that live has for free.
Ok, see you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡