How does TikTok search work?

What TikTok says about search

TikTok publishes a help page on how it recommends content, with a section on search. It names three groups of signals:

Signal group	What TikTok lists for search
Content information	How well the video matches the search, its hashtags, the sound used
User interactions	Your past searches, and the videos you like, share, comment on, watch in full or skip
User information	Device settings, language preference, location

For search, TikTok says content information usually counts most, and that it “may include how well the content matches the specific term entered”.

The For You feed works differently. On the same page, its content information includes the number of views, and TikTok says your own interactions usually count most there. Views are on TikTok’s list for the For You feed, not on its list for search.

A common belief is that search works like the feed, with engagement deciding the order. We tested what we could measure on 18,140 searches.

Test 1: do engagement and popularity predict position?

In each search, we found the video with the most likes in the top 20 and noted where it ranked. We did the same for shares, saves, views and the account’s followers. If TikTok ranked videos at random, the top video by any of these would be number one in 5% of searches, one in 20.

Measure	Top video by this measure was number 1	Its median position
Likes	6.0% of searches	10
Shares	6.5%	10
Saves	7.0%	9
Views	6.2%	10
Account followers	6.5%	10

The most-liked, most-shared or most-saved video was number one barely more often than chance. Its median position was 9 or 10, the middle of the top 20.

We also measured the rank correlation between each count and position, search by search. On that scale, 0 means no link and 1 means the counts put the videos in exactly TikTok’s order. The median was 0.07 for likes, 0.09 for shares, 0.11 for saves, 0.08 for views and 0.02 for followers: a faint link at best.

Small videos and small accounts rank high:

• 40% of top-20 videos had under 10,000 views, and so did a third of number-one videos.
• 56% came from accounts with under 10,000 followers, and so did 55% of number-one videos.
• The median top-three video had 26,400 views, against 18,300 for positions 4 to 20.

More popular videos sat slightly higher on average, but popularity didn’t decide the order. Watch time and completion rate remain untested: TikTok doesn’t publish them.

Test 2: do the words have to match?

In the 16,579 searches written in the Latin alphabet:

• 77% of top-20 videos had at least one of the search’s words in the caption.
• 9% had all of them.

Most top videos shared words with the search, but few used the exact phrase. Our count also understates the match, because some top videos carry the search only as a joined-up hashtag. The number three video for “hooker valley track guide” in Singapore on 21 October had the caption “Great hike!! Great scenery!!” and the tag #hookervalleytrack.

Where few videos answer a search well, loose matches fill the top places. On the same day, the number one video for “hobbiton photo angles” from Singapore was about a hobbit-themed village in Malaysia. A top-three result for “halal food christchurch” was about day trips in England. Searches like these are worth targeting: a video that answers them has little competition.

We could check captions only. Words on screen and in speech may count too.

Test 3: how old are the videos that rank?

Age at capture	Share of top-20 results
30 days or less	14.5%
31 to 90 days	18.6%
91 days to a year	42.9%
More than a year	24.0%

The median was 166 days. New videos get in, and old ones still rank. Instagram is different: for the same words searched in the same country on both platforms, the median Instagram result was 15 days old, against 161 days on TikTok. See how to do Instagram SEO.

Test 4: does the country change the results?

Yes, a lot. TikTok lists location as a signal. We compared the same words searched on the same day from two countries: 13,191 comparisons across 1,488 searches.

Two countries shared 24% of their top-20 videos: about 5 in 20. In 14% of comparisons they shared none.

Countries compared	Comparisons	Top-20 videos shared
US and UK	2,099	13%
Singapore and US	1,952	10%
Malaysia and Singapore	1,013	32%
Australia and Singapore	2,227	43%

Even countries that share a language see mostly different videos. TikTok results differed by country far more than Instagram’s (53% shared) or YouTube’s (75%).

When you search TikTok on your own phone, you see your own country’s results.

What this means if you want to rank

1. Match the search. Put the words your audience types in your caption, on screen and in what you say.
2. Don’t wait for a following. More than half of the videos that ranked came from accounts with under 10,000 followers.
3. Check from the right country, in your audience’s language.
4. Keep older videos up. A quarter of the results were over a year old.

For a step-by-step plan, see how to do TikTok SEO.