The news: Google lowered its requirements for search profiles—which aggregate a creator’s or brand’s accounts, videos, links, and recent posts into one shareable page—opening them up to a larger group of creators.

Channels now qualify for a custom display in Search once they reach 35,000 subscribers and followers on YouTube, Instagram, or X, or 100,000 followers on TikTok. That’s down from the previous requirement of 100,000 subscribers and followers on YouTube, Instagram, or X, or 300,000 on TikTok.

Google also added new reports in Search Console that offer insights on the queries consumers use to find a channel’s content and search volume.

In addition, YouTube changed its guidelines to count a view from the moment a video starts playing, without a minimum watch time. These announcements follow YouTube doubling the entry requirements for new creators on the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), which lets creators earn revenues from ads, memberships, and shopping features.

Why it matters: Lowering the barrier for creators to turn Search into a distribution and discovery hub gives mid-sized creators—and the brands working with them—more control over how their identities and content appear outside social platforms. It also substantially expands the pool of creators that Google can organize and surface.

The update could make creator search visibility a more meaningful consideration for brands as a larger volume of Search profiles adds another way for marketers to evaluate potential partners.

However, there’s a contrast between Google making creators easier to discover while YouTube makes them work harder to monetize content, letting Google benefit from a larger creator system even if fewer channels qualify for revenue sharing.

Recommendations for marketers: Assess creators beyond follower counts by looking into what kinds of queries surface them and how prominently their content appears in Search. Also, aim to work with creators with strong cross-platform footprints, who may have more consistent authority across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Remember that creator content can live longer in search results than in feeds, so align collaborations with topics that can keep attracting attention after a campaign ends versus campaigns that are focused on fleeting virality.

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