---
title: "Beauty Consumers and the Search Relay Race"
url: https://adtech.lol/articles/f78f2b7b-8320-440d-8233-42927b107d7b
source_url: https://searchengineland.com/beauty-consumers-google-search-493828/
source_site: searchengineland
author: "Reilly Phelps"
published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00
tags: ["Consumer behaviour", "Search Engine Marketing", "TikTok", "Instagram", "YouTube", "AI", "Beauty Products"]
publisher: AdTech Radar
---

# Beauty Consumers and the Search Relay Race

> Consumers are navigating multiple platforms during their beauty purchase journey, revealing significant shifts in online behavior and platform reliance.

# Introduction
Consumers are moving across multiple platforms in a single purchase journey, with each one serving a different function.

Earlier this year, Stella Rising surveyed 511 beauty consumers to find out exactly what that journey looks like, specifically when social platforms are involved, and the data pushed back on more than a few assumptions we had. (_**Disclosure**_: I work as SEO manager at Stella Rising.)  

We asked respondents to walk us through their actual discovery process — not what they thought they should do, but what they actually did the last time they found a product they were curious about.

The average respondent was 47 years old, with the largest cohorts in their 40s and 50s. This context makes the findings more interesting: These aren’t all Gen Z shoppers. They’re established, research-oriented consumers who are also using TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and AI as part of their beauty purchase process.

## Search has become a relay race
Our data showed consumers aren’t starting on one platform and staying there. They’re moving across multiple touchpoints in a single purchase journey, each one serving a different function.

The implications for how brands think about visibility, attribution, and investment are significant. And most brands are only optimizing for one leg of the race.

When we asked respondents where they go first for a beauty question, Google still came out on top — but not by the margin most people assume. Google is the first stop for 43% of people, while the remaining 57% is split across Instagram (11.9%), YouTube (11.2%), TikTok (10.6%), and AI tools (9.8%). No single alternative has overtaken Google, but collectively, they’ve taken more than half of that first click.

The 43% figure is the one that tends to get pulled out of context. On its own, it sounds like a story about Google’s dominance. But pair it with what happens next, and the picture changes: When a beauty consumer finds a product on TikTok, 72% search for it on Google. Only 7% buy directly through TikTok at that moment. What looks like a TikTok discovery is almost always a Google validation — and that second stop is where a lot of brands go invisible.

The behavior runs in both directions. Forty-one percent of respondents said they sometimes search on TikTok instead of Google for beauty questions, and 15% do it often. Among consumers in their 20s, 40% often or always use TikTok instead of Google, a significant shift in default search behavior for that cohort. And when they can’t find what they’re looking for on TikTok or YouTube, 61% fall back to Google.

The platforms aren’t replacing each other. They’re dividing up the work.

What’s worth noting is that TikTok search is more intentional than TikTok’s reputation as a passive scroll platform would suggest. When people search for beauty content there, they’re arriving with specific queries: 24% search by product name, 19% by skin or hair concern, 18% by brand name, and another 18% type out full questions. Only 7% search by ingredient, which is understandable. When people want to know what’s actually in something, they go to Google.

TikTok answers “does this work?” Google answers “should I trust it?” Each platform is doing a different job in the same journey.

## The generational divide is real, but it’s not what you expect
The easy version of the generational story goes like this: Younger consumers use TikTok, older consumers use Google, and brands should target accordingly. The data tells a more complicated and useful version.

Every single age group in our survey uses social media for beauty discovery. Not most age groups. All of them. What differs is which platforms they use and where they start.

For consumers in their 20s, that first stop splits almost evenly between Google (24%), AI tools (24%), and TikTok (20%). This is the only age group where AI is genuinely competing with Google for the first click.

By the 30s, Google pulls ahead at 39%, but TikTok and Instagram each claim 16% of first searches. By the 40s and 50s, Google leads at 45% and 43%, respectively.

By the 60s, it’s 50%. The older the consumer, the more likely Google is the reflex. However, social is still in the mix at every age, reinforcing that the shift isn’t simply from one dominant platform to another.

### Instagram plays a surprising role
The platform that surprised me most wasn’t TikTok. It was Instagram. Instagram was the most-used platform for beauty questions across every single age group in the survey, including the 40s and 50s cohorts where you might expect YouTube to dominate.

Even among consumers in their 20s, Instagram edged out TikTok (80% vs. 76%). And it’s not passive engagement: Instagram is driving direct website traffic in ways that are easy to miss because Meta’s attribution makes it hard to surface. The platform the search industry has largely moved on from in favor of TikTok is still the one your customers may use most.

### YouTube is more trusted
YouTube, meanwhile, is underrated for a different reason: trust. YouTube creators are rated “very trustworthy” by 14.1% of respondents versus just 8.6% for TikTok creators. That gap matters when a consumer is deeper in the research process and looking for something more credible than a 30-second video.

### Content type matters
The trust gap also shows up in where people go for specific content types. YouTube leads for makeup tutorials, where longer, more detailed videos earn that trust, while TikTok is nearly competitive with Google only for dupes and alternatives, a content type that’s inherently discovery-driven and lower stakes.

That content-type breakdown is worth sitting with. For skincare concerns and ingredient questions, Google dominates by a wide margin. But for the messier, more exploratory questions (what’s a cheaper version of this, what’s trending right now, does this actually work), TikTok has carved out real territory.

The implication isn’t “TikTok or Google.” Each platform has a job, and that job changes depending on what the consumer is trying to figure out.

### Social affects purchases for all generations
The purchase data makes clear that social influence is real at every age, even where you’d least expect it. Forty-one percent of all respondents made a beauty purchase in the last six months based on something they saw on TikTok or YouTube. Among consumers in their 30s, that number is 60%. Among the 40s, it’s 43%. Even among the 50s cohort, where TikTok skepticism is highest, it’s 34%.

The idea that social-driven purchase behavior is a Gen Z phenomenon doesn’t hold up. It’s a consumer phenomenon that happens to be most concentrated in younger cohorts — for now.

## AI usage isn’t what you may think it is
We’ve all heard in our marketing circles that everyone has moved to AI search. There is some truth to that: 24% of respondents in their 20s told us they turn to AI first when searching for beauty products. Among the marketers building search strategies, that number probably feels low. Among the clients approving those strategies, it might feel high.

However, across all 511 respondents, only 9.8% start their search journey with AI. For every person opening ChatGPT or Perplexity to ask about a serum, roughly nine others are opening Google, Instagram, or YouTube instead.

The gap between how our industry talks about AI adoption and how everyday consumers are actually behaving isn’t a rounding error. It’s a reflection of who we are. Marketers and SEOs are early adopters by nature. We’re stress-testing AI tools, building workflows around them, and writing think pieces about them. It’s easy to project our own behavior onto the audiences we’re trying to reach.

That said, dismissing AI entirely would also be a mistake. More than half (59.5%) of respondents reported using AI at some frequency in their search process. It may just not be the first stop. For most beauty consumers right now, AI is a supporting tool: something they consult mid-journey to synthesize information, not something they lead with.

### The brand implication matters
If you’re reallocating budget away from social and toward GEO because you’ve read that AI is taking over search, you’re optimizing for a future that hasn’t arrived yet for most of your customers (and possibly undermining the channels that actually drive discovery).

There’s also a compounding effect to consider. Strong social presence and earned media are increasingly what AI systems pull from when they surface brand recommendations. Social and GEO aren’t competing priorities.  

This brings us to the harder problem. The reason so many brands are struggling to see social search in their data isn’t that it isn’t working — it’s because the tools we’ve relied on to measure search were never built for a world where the journey looks like this.

## The attribution elephant in the room
Let’s say a consumer sees your blush on TikTok, searches your brand name on Google to read some reviews, lands on your site, and then buys it on Amazon three days later because that’s where they have Prime shipping. You got the sale. Your data shows a branded Google search, maybe a direct session, and an Amazon order with no referral attached. TikTok gets zero credit. And your next budget conversation happens based on that incomplete picture.

This isn’t an edge case. It’s the default journey for a significant share of beauty consumers (or really, most consumers) right now.

## The technical breakdown starts way before the Amazon purchase
TikTok’s in-app browser, the one that opens when a user clicks a link without leaving the app, doesn’t always fire GA4 events correctly. That means when someone moves from a TikTok video to your website, the session can arrive without a source, get misattributed to direct, or drop entirely. You have a conversion with no origin story.

Multiply that across thousands of sessions, and the GA4 data you’re using to make channel decisions is structurally missing a significant slice of social-influenced traffic.

What if someone didn’t click on the link in your bio and instead went to Google and searched for your brand name? That means the user journey will definitely not be tracked in any of your platforms, and you’re missing out completely on the social part of the puzzle when looking at reporting.

## Then there’s the Amazon problem
Nearly half of respondents (47.7%) said they typically complete their beauty purchases on Amazon. That purchase is invisible to your site analytics. It’s invisible to most attribution models. And if you’re only looking at last-touch data within your own ecosystem, you’re systematically undercounting the value of every channel that influenced the decision before someone opened the Amazon app.

The measurement framework that served search marketing well for the past decade was built around a world where consumers searched, clicked, and converted in a traceable sequence on properties you controlled. That world is gone for a large portion of your customer base. Going back to the relay race metaphor: If you only have timing equipment at the finish line, you have no idea how the first three legs went.

## You need the right metrics
Visibility tracking has to become part of how you define and measure success — not a secondary metric, but a primary one. The question isn’t just “did we get the conversion?” It’s “are we showing up where our customers are actually searching?”

That means tracking your presence in TikTok search results, monitoring how AI systems represent your brand in response to beauty queries, and measuring your share of voice in organic search in categories where your customers are actively looking. Tools like TokTrak for TikTok search visibility, AI tracking platforms for GEO presence, and Semrush for traditional search share make cross-platform visibility measurement possible.

This setup is not a perfect replacement for conversion attribution, but it gives you a much more accurate picture of whether your brand is in the consideration set, where the real competition is happening.

## What this actually means for your search strategy
The direction things are going is clear. Thirty-one percent of respondents said they’re using social platforms more for beauty research than they were two years ago. Only 10% said they’re using it less. This isn’t a trend at its peak. It’s one that is still building, and it’s doing so across age groups that people may assume are Google-loyal.

The brands that win in this environment won’t be the ones that chase whichever platform is having a moment. They’ll be the ones who accept the fundamental shift in how a purchase decision is actually made: not in a single session, not on a single platform, but across a multi-step research journey where discovery, validation, and conversion often occur in completely different places.

Your customer is doing a relay race every time they consider buying something. The brands showing up only at the finish line are invisible for most of it.

## Google endures, but its role has changed
None of this is an argument for abandoning Google. Google remains the platform where the largest share of consumers start their search and where the majority end up at some point in the journey, even if they started elsewhere.

The data show that Google is no longer the first chapter for a growing number of shoppers, and that being present only in traditional organic and paid search means missing the moments that shape consideration before intent is fully formed.

The practical implication is this: Google still matters, but showing up there isn’t enough when consideration is being shaped elsewhere. Brands need to be present across the platforms consumers use for discovery, research, and validation — before intent is fully formed. 

The consumer has already moved. The question is whether your strategy has.

Source: [https://searchengineland.com/beauty-consumers-google-search-493828/](https://searchengineland.com/beauty-consumers-google-search-493828/)