Iemke Roos argues that as demand generation shifts to TikTok and Reddit, Christian media makers must stop treating search as the starting point and start treating it as the outcome of ideas planted weeks earlier.
There is a particular kind of pride that comes from ranking first for a good keyword. I have felt it myself, more than once, and I recommend it. But a thought comes, reading Billy Grace’s new half-year figures out of Emerce, that the pride may be increasingly misplaced. Google Search’s share of the average media strategy has slipped to fifty-seven per cent, down eight percentage points in half a year. Reddit spend is up by nearly six hundred fifty per cent. TikTok by sixty-five. Something is moving, and it is not moving toward the search bar. It is moving away from it, at least at the start.
The question is no longer answered, it is planted
For two decades, digital strategy for Christian organizations - publishers, ministries, mission agencies, the lot - has assumed a tidy sequence. Someone has a question. They type it into Google. An organization that has done its keyword homework appears, and a relationship begins. It is a sensible model, and it is aging quickly. What the Billy Grace numbers describe, and what any honest look at a teenager’s phone confirms, is that the question itself is now often manufactured before it is ever typed. A short video on TikTok plants a curiosity. A Reddit thread turns curiosity into a felt need. Weeks later, sometimes longer, the same person opens Google and finally asks the question that a piece of content quietly taught them to ask.
This is not a minor adjustment to the funnel. It is a reversal of it. The old order ran from intention to content: someone wanted something, and content answered. The new order runs from content to intention: content creates the wanting, and search merely records it afterward, like a notary confirming a decision already made elsewhere. For anyone making Christian media, this ought to be a bracing thought, because most of the sector’s content strategy - mine included, in earlier years - was built entirely for the old order. We optimized for the moment of arrival. We spent rather less on the moment of ideation, the quiet seed-planting that happens on a platform nobody in a church staff meeting takes quite seriously enough.
Creators, not campaigns, own the seed-planting stage
Here is where the argument becomes uncomfortable for anyone who likes a media plan with clean lines of authority. If demand is generated weeks before search, then the decisive work is not done by the search-engine-optimized article or the well-tagged podcast episode. It is done earlier, by a creator making something a viewer did not know they wanted to see, on a platform where the algorithm rewards curiosity rather than answers. Emerce’s report notes, rightly, that an advertiser on Reddit or TikTok or Pinterest learns something about an audience that Google Search, by its nature, cannot teach: not what people are already asking, but what they might yet come to ask. That is a different kind of listening, and it belongs to the creator’s instinct more than to the strategist’s dashboard.```
This matters more, not less, for organizations whose product is meaning rather than merchandise. A question about faith rarely announces itself cleanly in a search bar on day one. It is usually preceded by a story, an image, a stray comment under someone else’s video that lodges somewhere and resurfaces weeks later as a search term nobody could have predicted. If that is where the real beginning happens, then treating search as the front door and everything else as decoration gets the architecture backward. Ideation comes first. Search is the result, not the request.
None of this makes search obsolete, and I would resist anyone who says so with more confidence than the eight-percentage-point figure warrants. It does suggest that a Christian organization still measuring its success by keyword rankings alone is grading itself on the final exam while skipping the semester that determined the score. The demand was generated somewhere else, earlier, by someone willing to make a video before anyone asked for it. That, increasingly, is the job. Search will follow, in its own time, as it always has - only now it arrives last, not first.