Every business owner has lain awake asking some version of the same question: does social media actually help me get found?
Short answer, still yes. Longer answer: the thing you’re trying to get found in has changed shape completely since we first wrote this.
tldr; everything you need to know
In tourism and hospitality you are all fighting over the same handful of keywords. Best breakfast in Freo. Margaret River wineries with a view. Things to do in Perth when it rains. You cannot out-muscle that fight. You can out-position it.
Here’s how the two halves fit together now.
1. Search isn’t one box any more
The old model was simple: rank on Google, get the click, take the booking.
That model is leaking badly. In 2024, 58.5% of US Google searches ended without a click, and Seer Interactive found organic click-through fell 61% on queries showing an AI Overview between June 2024 and September 2025. Pew’s behavioural study of nearly 69,000 real searches found people clicked a traditional result 8% of the time when an AI summary was present, against 15% when it wasn’t. Google disputes the methodology of some of this research, and the panels behind each study differ, so read it as direction rather than gospel. The direction is not subtle.
Meanwhile your customer is running the same decision across four surfaces. Sprout Social’s 2026 trends report says nearly one in three consumers skip Google altogether and start their search on TikTok, Instagram or YouTube, rising to more than half of Gen Z (Q2 2025 Pulse Survey). They watch a video, check a thread, ask an AI, then maybe visit your website last of all.
So social content is not “support” for your search program any more. It is a search surface in its own right, and it needs to be written like one: real questions, real answers, spoken plainly, in captions and on-screen text a machine can actually read.
2. Social is now a source that AI answers pull from
This is the update that matters most.
In Goodie’s tracking of 1.86 million social citations, social’s share of AI search citations grew from 4.9% to 7.2% between January and August 2026. But here’s the part nobody puts on the slide: across that same seven months the major models changed which social platforms they cite sixteen times, five of those reversing an earlier shift, none of them announced. BrightEdge tracked Reddit’s slice of Google AI Overview citations for a set of ecommerce queries falling from 28% to 17% in eleven weeks while YouTube’s more than doubled.
Two things follow from that.
First, the open platforms win more often. Reddit and YouTube consistently outperform the more closed networks for citation, because their text is crawlable: transcripts, titles and descriptions give AI systems something to quote. If you have never written a proper YouTube description for your venue tour, that is a free afternoon’s work with a long tail.
Second, do not build a strategy on one platform’s citation share. It will be wrong by the next quarter. Build a mix, keep the content genuinely useful, and let the models sort themselves out.
3. Brand awareness is the one signal AI can’t intercept
An AI Overview can answer “best cafe in Cottesloe” without sending anyone anywhere. It cannot answer “what’s the name of that cafe in Cottesloe with the blue tiles” unless people already know you.
Branded search is the traffic no summary layer can take off you. Someone who has seen your reels for three months, saved one, and typed your name into Google is not a zero-click risk. They are a booking.
That is the real commercial argument for turning up on social every week. Not reach. Not likes. Demand for your name specifically, which converts harder and costs nothing to defend once it exists.
4. Local search and social still carry each other
None of the above has dented local. If anything it has concentrated it.
Your Google Business Profile, your review velocity, your opening hours being right on a public holiday, your location tags, your customers posting from your dining room: these still feed local ranking and they still decide who gets the 6.30pm booking. AI systems also cross-reference, checking what your profile claims against what your website confirms and what other people say about you, so inconsistency across your listings is now a visibility problem, not just a tidiness problem.
Practical version: same name, same address, same hours everywhere. Reviews answered, not ignored. Customer content reshared so there is more third-party evidence of you than first-party marketing about you.
Pro tip: find your AI traffic in GA4, because it’s hiding
The old advice was to check your Traffic Acquisition report for organic social by platform. Still do that. But it is now half the picture.
GA4 added a native AI Assistant channel on 13 May 2026, which covers assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude when a referrer is passed. Google does not list Perplexity among the sources it names, and it misses every session that arrives without a referrer, which lands in Direct instead. The fix is a custom channel group: Admin, Data Display, Channel Groups, create a new channel matching your AI domains by regex, and drag it above Referral, because GA4 stops at the first match. Google says custom channel groups apply to your reports retroactively, so you will see your past AI traffic too.
One caveat worth knowing before you chase your tail: clicks from inside a Google AI Overview arrive looking exactly like organic Google traffic, so you cannot isolate them at channel level in GA4 at all.
Small numbers here are normal. Watch engaged sessions and enquiries rather than session count, because the people who still click after reading a synthesised answer have already done their research.
Final thoughts: stop optimising for a page, start optimising for an answer
The old goal was a blue link in position one. The new goal is being the thing that gets named when someone, or something, answers the question.
That means your social and your site have to say the same thing, clearly, repeatedly, in language a human and a model both understand. Content that answers a real question. Video with a transcript and a proper description. Listings that agree with each other. A brand people can search by name.
Running a venue, a content program and a search strategy at once is a lot. That’s our job. Start your enquiry and let’s look at where you’re actually being found.
Curious what is hiding in your numbers? Send us your GA4 access and we will show you the social and AI traffic hiding in it.