Inside the search rumor swirling around Meta

Three agency execs told Digiday that Meta has confirmed its working on something in search though the company’s staying tight-lipped on the details for now. 

“I spoke with some friends to ask if they can confirm that they’re working on a search ad product and they said yeah we are planning it, but we don’t have anything to share today,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, global evp paid social at Jellyfish.

Another exec put it this way: “They [Meta] told us they are developing something and there will be additional innovations on the search front, but not much else. We speculate it will be ingrained with some of their AI, but we don’t know the timeline [of when said product will be launched].”

The vacuum of detail has done what vacuums do in this industry: filled itself with speculation. 

Chowdhury said that he realized Instagram search has gotten far better, which is what led him to ask about Meta’s plans.

“Usually when a search engine gets better, that’s an indication for a platform to tell advertisers how good their search is for brands and categories, and how well they’re able to index it,” he said.

Turns out, that instinct was right on the money. 

“Meta has mentioned [to us] that they are trying to improve search across Instagram and Facebook, specifically with AI,” said Sam Piliero, founder and head of growth at The Moonlighters. 

Piliero said he believes Meta is coming at search from the perspective of a large language model, by using all of the information they have available from the videos across their platforms because it’ll allow for a much more complex search. It’s also a logical step for Meta’s broader AI push—search is a key ingredient in training large language models, and the company’s superintelligence group is already exploring how to use that data to build more powerful generative AI systems. It’s a natural extension of the company’s AI strategy. 

“I think they’re [Meta] is trying to pioneer their AI search,” he said. “If you search anything on Instagram right now, you get the little AI snippet already. It doesn’t seem like [Mark] Zuckerberg is backing down on this at all.”

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said as much on the Build Your Tribe podcast back in April.

“We’re … starting to invest more in search on Instagram because there’s so much amazing content,” he said on the podcast. “And quite frankly, what we call content search — as opposed to searching for an account, actually searching for some type of content — it’s not very good on Instagram.” 

As for when any of this might be revealed, some execs think we’re looking at the end of 2026, since Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the goal is for advertisers to be able to fully create, target, and automate ads — including search and other formats — using AI.

“I could imagine some alpha version being rolled out to some advertisers ahead of the 2025 holiday season, because it then gives Meta a chance to take some early learnings from it and still capitalize on it during the big Q4 period.” said Chowdhury.

In the meantime, Meta has been pushing its search lift product, which has been available through this year so far. According to the second exec, whose clients have been experimenting with it, the search lift has consistently shown that Meta campaigns drive a lift in traditional search.

“It comes up every now and then, but I think typically you see Meta bringing it up more so with clients that are very heavy in traditional search,” they said.

Meta did not respond to Digiday’s request for comment.