Not too long ago, TikTok was postured as the future of search. Where Google returned links, TikTok served short-form videos showing people how to cook, where to eat and what the ingredients actually looked like. Then large language models (LLMs) arrived and rewrote the dynamics of search entirely.
That doesn’t necessarily hurt TikTok, said Isobel Sita-Lumsden, TikTok’s global head of business marketing, who recently stepped into her expanded role, taking over from Sofia Hernandez who left at the end of March. The search behavior it cultivated was always less about information retrieval and more about discovery. In fact, daily searches on the platform are up 40% year on year, per the company. Whether it continues to grow given how AI is rapidly changing the way people access information remains to be seen.
TikTok’s argument is that discovery on its platform endures because it moves faster, compared to other platforms. A user will search for a product, be inundated with related creator content, see comments and make a purchase, more often than not within the same app session. That process is being increasingly identified internally as a “collapsed funnel,” where discovery, consideration and conversion happen at the same time.
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