San Juan, PR – To understand the state of search, TikTok’s Tim Natividad pointed to the Super Bowl Half-Time Show featuring hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar. Actually, it wasn’t about Lamar’s rapping or choreography. The big search moment was all about Lamar’s flared jeans.
Natividad, the US Head of Enterprise Sales, Global Business Solutions at TikTok, was at the Super Bowl with the team at American Eagle. Following Lamar’s performance, TikTok showed trending searches surging for the rapper’s flared jeans.
“That’s a really powerful example of how a cultural moment can translate not just onto TikTok, but then onto search,” Natividad said, speaking with David Kaplan at the Beet Retreat San Juan. “It turns out that 45% of users actually go to TikTok search after having discovered something that they’re initially excited about on the main video feed.”
Video-based search evolution
As AI-powered search alternatives like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek reshape the landscape, TikTok is carving its own unique path with video-based discovery.
“Over the last 25 years, search has primarily been a tech-based medium for a lot of audiences and users,” Natividad explained. “TikTok is a little different, obviously we’re a video-based platform. We have 170 million monthly active users.”
This difference has positioned TikTok to play “a little bit of a different role in terms of illustrating how video-based search, not just text-based search, but video-based search actually influences a consumer’s pathway to purchase.”
Search behaviors on TikTok
Internal TikTok research has revealed significant engagement with its search functionality. “One in four TikTok users actually goes to the search results page of TikTok within the first 30 seconds,” Natividad noted.
He described what he calls the “rabbit hole effect” of TikTok discovery: “Sometimes when I’m at dinner with friends or family, I always kind of think in my head someone would be saying, ‘I was researching this and I was studying up on this,’ and in the back of my mind I’m thinking you were watching TikTok.”
New paid search product
After extensive testing with agency partners, Natividad announced that TikTok’s standalone paid search product has moved beyond beta testing. The new tool was crafted with agency partners Publicis and Dentsu.
“[Those agencies said to us], ‘Hey, if you guys are going to enter search, we know that you understand social, we know that you understand video buying all these last few years, but know that within search, if you’re going to have a paid standalone search opportunity, there’s keyword level bidding, keyword level attribution,’” he said.
Business impact
For brands implementing both video feed and search campaigns simultaneously, TikTok reports significant performance improvements.
“18% of users who don’t convert for your brand — or your product or your service — through your video ads end up converting again later after being exposed to a search campaign,” Natividad said. “What that does is actually drive on average for us, about a 20% increase in return on ad spend for brands that have both video feed campaigns and search campaigns live at the same time versus just video feed campaigns alone.”
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