Google loses ground to Reddit and TikTok as market shifts towards demand generation
Google Search’s share in the average media strategy fell to 57% in the first half of 2026, a drop of eight percentage points, according to figures from Dutch marketing analytics firm Billy Grace. Furthermore alternatives like Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, Bing and YouTube have made unprecedented progress.
According to a report Google and Meta may have peaked and ‘newcomers’ are being used to learn, recognise and formulate search intent.
A media plan containing only Google and Meta is, to put it bluntly, not only a ‘concentration risk’ but also leads to a lag in audience knowledge. An advertiser on Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube can learn a great deal on these platforms about who their customers are and what drives them.
There is a visible development in which European publishers and ad networks are responding to this concentration risk. They are encouraging advertisers to work more often with local parties instead of big tech, precisely in order to become less dependent on these exotic players.
Billy Grace stated that advertisers must seize the opportunity to pay their tuition fees for new networks. The advice is that they should invest 5-10% of their advertising budget in these new channels. Moreover, rates there were not yet exceptionally high.
Billy Grace clients found an 8% decline for Google and a 2% increase for Meta, and double-digit growth figures for the new networks. Advertising investment on Reddit rose by almost 650%, TikTok by 65%, Pinterest by 42%, Bing by 34% and YouTube by 15%.
Managing director and co-founder Mitch Voskuilen said: “With this shift, organisations are demonstrating that they are focusing more on generating new demand than on capturing existing demand.” He noted that consumers are no longer orienting themselves exclusively via the search bar, but are discovering brands increasingly via communities, videos and social platforms, long before any search query is involved. Google is therefore still seen as a complement to this, not as superfluous.
Search and the new channels are not presented in the report as competitors, but as two links in the same chain. Google Search is positioned as the channel that captures existing demand: someone who already knows what they are looking for simply types it in. Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube are situated earlier in the journey: at the moment when a consumer still has to get to know a brand. A conversion that ultimately comes in via Search may therefore also have been triggered in part by a video someone saw on TikTok weeks earlier.
This shift was demonstrated in the report: the combined share of channels early in the customer journey grew by 3.9 percentage points. This is happening in a year in which average cost per click fell by 11%.
Smaller and medium-sized advertisers in particular are achieving efficiency gains by testing the new channels. Among the largest advertisers, budget and results are growing at roughly the same rate.
Reddit is, incidentally, becoming a risky network, a point that the Billy Grace report did not highlight. The forum is now one of the most cited sources in AI-generated answers, with a position approaching that of Wikipedia. This makes the platform attractive as a channel to be found via AI search results, but it also makes Reddit vulnerable to manipulation.
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