Search everywhere optimisation is the practice of making a business findable wherever its customers search, not just on Google. That includes video platforms, social apps, marketplaces, forums, review sites and AI assistants, each treated as a search engine in its own right.
How search everywhere optimisation works
People now look for answers in many places. Someone planning a kitchen refit might watch YouTube walkthroughs, search TikTok for ideas, read Reddit threads about installers, check reviews on Trustpilot and ask ChatGPT for a shortlist, before ever typing a company name into Google. Each of those places has its own search box and its own way of deciding what to show.
The approach starts with finding out where your customers actually search, then applying search principles to each place:
- Video: titles, descriptions, chapters and captions that match how people phrase questions, covered under YouTube SEO.
- Social platforms: captions, on-screen text and spoken keywords that TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest can index, known as social SEO.
- Marketplaces: product titles, attributes and reviews on Amazon, eBay or Etsy; see marketplace SEO.
- Forums and communities: genuine, helpful participation where your expertise is relevant, never disguised promotion.
- AI assistants: clear, consistent, well-cited information about your business across the web, which AI tools draw on when they answer. This overlaps with generative engine optimisation.
Your own website stays at the centre. It is the place you control fully, it is where most other platforms link back to, and it is a primary source for Google and for many AI answers.
Why it matters
Google itself increasingly surfaces content from other platforms: short videos, forum discussions and social posts appear within ordinary results. So presence elsewhere can help you appear on Google too. And for some audiences, younger buyers in particular, social and video apps are a first stop for product and service discovery.
For a small UK business, the risk is spreading too thin. Running six channels badly achieves less than doing two well. The point is to choose platforms based on evidence of where your customers look, not on what is fashionable.
Consider a Bristol furniture maker. Their buyers may watch workshop videos on YouTube and save ideas on Pinterest, then search the business name on Google before ordering. Optimising those two platforms, and making sure the website and Google Business Profile tell the same story, covers the real journey without trying to master every app.
Common mistakes
- Being everywhere at once. Opening accounts on every platform and abandoning most of them after a month.
- Neglecting the website. Off-site channels change their rules often; the site is the asset you own.
- Posting identical content everywhere. Each platform rewards its own formats and language.
- Inconsistent business details. Different names, addresses or descriptions across platforms confuse both people and AI systems.
- Undisclosed promotion. Posting about your own business on forums or social media without saying who you are often breaches community rules and misleads readers, and paid or incentivised posts must be labelled as advertising under the CAP Code.
How to act on it
Ask recent customers where they looked before contacting you, and check your analytics for referrals from YouTube, social apps and AI tools. Pick the one or two platforms that come up most and build a presence there with content that answers real questions. Keep your business name, description, contact details and key facts identical everywhere. Then measure enquiries by source and adjust.
For the AI assistant side specifically, my AI search optimisation service looks at how your business is described across the sources those tools rely on and what to change.