74% of Young Australians Aren't Searching on Google. Is Your Salon Showing Up Where They Are?

A press release landed in my inbox this morning. I've been thinking about it ever since, which tells you everything you need to know about the kind of parties I get invited to.

Oysterly Media just released research conducted with 1,200 Australians in Q1 2026, and found that only 26% of Gen Z Australians now turn to Google first when they want to buy something. The rest, a full 74%, start on social media or AI.

Let that sit for a second.

Three-quarters of your youngest clients are not searching on Google and typing "best facial Melbourne." They're opening Instagram or TikTok, or asking an AI tool, and making decisions.

Before you write this off as a Gen Z problem, three in ten Gen X Australians are now discovering products through social scrolling too. The generation that grew up doing actual window shopping has simply moved the window online.

Millennials are conspicuously absent from these findings, which tracks. We were likely mid-doom-scroll about the housing market or our adult ADHD diagnosis and didn't see the survey notification come through.

So if they're not searching on Google, where are your clients actually going?

The Oysterly Media data found that social media now drives 29% of all product discovery among Australians. That's more than three times the rate of brand websites, which sit at 9%. Nearly half of young Australians (42%) go directly to a brand's social profile to make their final purchase decision.

What's winning is content that doesn't feel like advertising. Real demos, client results and stories, a skin therapist talking to camera about why she recommends a particular treatment, education that doesn't sound like a brochure.

.

...or worse, a brochure about a lecture.

Oysterly Media's CEO, Melissa Laurie, put it plainly: "Brands that understand that shift and build content that earns attention rather than buying it are the ones that will come out ahead."

That sentence could honestly have been written specifically for clinic owners.

So what does this mean for your copy and content? This is where I'll add my own two cents, because the data points to something specific.

If 74% of your potential clients are starting their research on social or AI, then two very different pieces of your content strategy need to be working hard simultaneously.

The first is your social presence, which we've covered. Specific, voiced, human. Not "we offer a range of tailored treatments to suit your individual skin needs," which is the copy equivalent of beige carpet tiles and still lives on more salon profiles than I'd like to admit.

The second is everything on your website, and this is where the AI piece gets interesting.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude or whatever their weapon of choice is, which clinic to visit for a skin consultation in their area, those tools aren't just pulling from social media. They're pulling from sources like your website copy, blog posts, FAQs and ultimately, the depth and specificity of language you use to explain what you do and who you do it for.

AI search rewards the same things good copy has always rewarded: clarity, specificity, genuine expertise communicated in plain language. What it penalises is the stuff that a lot of sites are full of right now: thin pages, vague descriptions, and content generated in bulk that reads like it. That stuff gets ignored or, worse, actively filtered out.

So the copy argument for 2026 is actually two arguments running at once.

1. Show up on social like a human worth following.

2. Show up on your website like an expert worth trusting.

The platforms are different, but the brief is the same: sound like yourself, say something specific, and give people a reason to choose you over the twelve other options that just came up in the same search.

The ones still losing sleep over their Google ranking that their clients have mostly stopped using? Well. The data is pretty clear on where that leaves them.

Research cited: Oysterly Media and Oaktree Insights and Consulting, The Changing Landscape of Discovery and Trust, Q1 2026 (n=1,200 Australians).