OK, so I might have just stumbled onto a pretty big SEO story this year.

This week, I was doing a bit of searching around our company “Nectiv” and was interested when I saw not one but two different of my LinkedIn posts ranking.

I thought that was a bit peculiar. Generally I’d expect a couple of the sites our agency is listed on, or our own social profiles to be appearing. But these were actual posts I’ve written (in LinkedIn’s /posts/ subfolder). One about the launch of Nectiv and another about our AI tracker.

A bit curious, I dug a bit further. Turns out it isn’t just our brand LinkedIn is showing up for. Looking at the posts subfolder in Ahrefs, we can see that they’ve netted nearly +2.2M estimated sessions since October 2025!!

That’s some pretty incredible growth in just 2 months. Basically LinkedIn posts are seeing the double the amount of organic visibility. I figured if LinkedIn was seeing this growth, others might be as well.

Well as it turns out, other social posts are in fact seeing seeing the same trends. Twitter and Threads are both seeing sizable leaps in terms of their organic traffic.

Twitter is the most notable mover. Since October, Twitter threads (/status/ URL) have seen a +19M estimated monthly sessions. That’s a 243% increase in their visibility in Google ecosystem.

Threads has also seen sizable increases as well. While their platform is newer and less established, they still managed to grow by +1.2 M organic sessions.

If you look at the timelines, all of these sites started seeing initial lifts in traffic during October 2025. Clearly something has majorly shifted in Google’s algorithm during this time.

Google’s New “What People Are Saying Feature”

When looking into why this shifts were happening, I started manually checking some queries. One of the most common features was the prominence of a “What People Are Saying” feature. Here’s an example:

Before Barry Schwartz jumps in here and tells me this is not new, I’ll say…this is not net. Apparently it’s been around since January 2025, so almost a year now. However, if you look at the original discoveries, it was buried in Google’s PAAs. Now we can see its much more integrated into the main search experience.

So overall the improved organic data probably isn’t a true reflection of actual traffic but improve visibility for extremely popular search terms.

Looking Into The Shifts

I also wanted to look a bit under the hood to see what types of queries social media platforms are performing well for. I started by looking at LinkedIn to see the biggest improvements when comparing December 2025 to September 2025.

After running 30K queries through Claude, it found these were the common types of queries Linkedin if improving for:

1. Companies & Organizations (advance auto, archer aviation)
2. People & Personalities (Mira Murati, Molly Ringwald)
3. AI & Machine Learning (data annotation, what is ai)
4. Career & Job Search

When manually looking through some of the threads, they seem to have some common characteristic. Many of them tend to be longer form and have some level of optimization for the query. Some of them even dare to link to external resources (a big no no in organic social posts).

For example, here’s a thread ranking for “reverse image search” (NSFW). You can see how the post is kind of written like a well-optimized blog article.

Twitter saw the most dramatic uplifts of all the social platforms. Performing a similar analysis with Claude, here are the top categories that it saw improvements for during the past 1.5 months:

1. People & Personalities
2. Entertainment
3. Sports & Athletics
4. Companies & Organizations
5. Adult Content

I’d say there’s appears to be some overall topical differences on how these domains are treated but the reality is that it probably comes down to the content that’s being posted more than anything.

Conclusion

I think for a long time SEOs have generally said that social media doesn’t impact Google’s rankings. That seems to be slowly changing over time. Google has been integrating social content on the search results for awhile now (Twitter feeds, Forums tab). However, this is yet another push to get more “human experiences” directly in the search results.

I wouldn’t go all in on a social media strategy that integrates SEO. However, it might be worthwhile to get your SEOs advice on small tweaks changes and potentially some small tests to see if you can impact things on the social side. I might try a test or two on my LinkedIn page just to see what happens.