If you have a professional Instagram account, you may have seen a notice appear in the app in recent days informing you that soon your photos could appear in search engines like Google. If you skipped it without reading, watch out because you’re missing this new option that Instagram is going to enable by default on your account and you might not want it enabled. The popular social network will index your photos on Google, making them able to appear in results when someone searches for content on the search engine.
But not only on Google, but on any search engine. This directive will take effect starting July 10, 2025 and if you want to oppose it, you can disable it from the Instagram app itself.
Check if your Instagram photos will appear in Google search
The Instagram notice we mentioned earlier reads as follows:
“Starting July 10, 2025, search engines may automatically show all photos and videos in results pages; this means more people could discover content from your professional account outside of Instagram.”
And from that same message we can accept or decline this change. But if you dismissed the message or accepted it by mistake, you can disable your Instagram photos from appearing in Google and other search engines’ results.
To do so, simply follow these steps:
- Open the Instagram app, and on your profile tap the three lines icon to go to Settings and activity.
- In Settings and activity, look for the Account privacy section.
- You will see a new field that reads: Allow public photos and videos to appear in search engine results. You just need to turn it off.
Note that, if enabled, this will only affect posts that are public, so photos restricted to your Instagram Close Friends will not be indexed on Google.
Likewise, if your account is set to private, no content from your profile will be able to appear directly in search engine results, although a link to the post on your profile may be shown (but if you have it private, or the post is restricted to your Close Friends, the content will not be visible).
What exactly does this new social network measure mean?
While it has already been possible to find Instagram links in search engines (for a long time; in fact, if you’ve searched for information about a celebrity, you’ve likely come across their Instagram account, for example), what the social network now states is that your photos and videos could appear directly in Google Images, for example, or other company products. And, as we’ve said, not only on Google, but on other search engines (Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and many others).
Finally, it’s worth noting that this measure, in principle, only affects professional accounts (business, creator…). If you have a personal account where you post vacation photos, this should not affect you; in fact, the option illustrated above will not even appear for you.
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