Stella Rising says Google is where 43% of the 511 beauty consumers it surveyed begin a question, and that 72% of those who spot a product on TikTok then look it up on Google. Search Engine Land published the figures on October 7 in a contributed column by Reilly Phelps, an SEO manager at Stella Rising. The author works for the company that ran the survey, so this is vendor research reported by its own employee, not independent measurement.
The column says the survey was conducted “earlier this year.” Respondents averaged 47 years old, with most in their 40s and 50s. It reports no fielding dates, no margin of error, and no methodology. It also gives no sample sizes for age subgroups, which matters because the twenty-something findings rest on a slice of a sample that skews older.
On first stops, the column puts Google at 43%, followed by Instagram at 11.9%, YouTube at 11.2%, TikTok at 10.6%, and AI tools at 9.8%. Those four alternatives add up to 43.5%, yet the column describes the non-Google share as 57%. About 13.5 points are unaccounted for in the published text.
The TikTok findings are the headline for search teams. Just 7% of those product finders complete the purchase on the platform itself. Separately, 41% report sometimes choosing TikTok over Google for beauty queries, and 15% do so often. When TikTok or YouTube fails to answer, 61% fall back to Google.
Age splits show where the pattern shifts. For the youngest cohort, respondents in their 20s, the opening query divides between Google at 24%, AI tools at 24%, and TikTok at 20%. Google leads at 39% in the 30s, 45% in the 40s, 43% in the 50s, and 50% in the 60s. Instagram drew the heaviest beauty-question use in every age group, including the 20s, where it edged TikTok 80% to 76%.
Trust and purchase data add texture. The survey found 14.1% of respondents rate YouTube creators “very trustworthy,” against 8.6% for TikTok creators. Overall, 41% bought something in the last six months because of TikTok or YouTube content, rising to 60% among people in their 30s. On AI, 59.5% report using it somewhere in their search routine, though 9.8% start there. Amazon is where 47.7% say they usually complete a purchase.
The two headline numbers answer different questions, and the useful reading keeps them apart. The 43% describes where a question begins. The 72% describes what happens after discovery on one platform. Together they suggest Google can be a minority starting point and still serve as the checkpoint where a social-sparked interest becomes a branded or product-name query. Search teams should not add the figures or treat the 72% as a share of all respondents; it covers only people who found a product on TikTok.
Two claims in the column are the author’s, not survey results. Phelps says sessions from TikTok’s in-app browser can show up in GA4 with no source, or get credited to direct traffic, because event tracking misfires at times. The column recommends monitoring presence in TikTok search, AI platforms, and organic results instead of relying on last-touch attribution alone. The column offers no test data for the GA4 claim.
All of this concerns beauty consumers in one agency-run sample, and nothing in it supports conclusions about other categories. Beauty teams can use it as a hypothesis: check whether branded and product-name queries in Search Console rise after social campaigns, and compare direct-traffic share against campaign timing before trusting last-touch reports.
Search Engine Land, contributed column by Reilly Phelps of Stella Rising reporting Stella Rising’s own survey of 511 beauty consumers, October 7, 2026.
