Gen Z is quietly replacing Google with TikTok for product discovery, and most brand influencer strategies have not caught up. New research from Refluenced suggests the gap is larger and more actionable than the industry has acknowledged.
The Zurich and Berlin-based marketplace analyzed 50,000 keywords and 160,000 videos across the UK and DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) markets. The finding that defines the study: 40% of brands are effectively invisible on TikTok search. They are not ranking. They are not being found. For a platform where 68% of Gen Z users use TikTok as a search engine daily, that is not a distribution problem. It is an existence problem.
“If you’re not ranked on these keywords, you just don’t exist for these clients,” says Quirin Hasler, co-founder and CEO of Refluenced. “That’s something very concerning.”
Refluenced operates as a marketplace connecting nano and micro influencers with brands through a reverse-application model: creators apply to campaigns rather than waiting for outreach. Founded in 2022, the company reports connecting more than 30,000 creators with brands, completing over 4,000 campaigns, and facilitating CHF 5 million (~6.4M) in product value. The UK and DACH research, released ahead of a planned U.S. expansion at Cannes Lions, draws on that campaign history to identify what is working and what most brands are still getting wrong.
TikTok Is a Search Engine. Most Brand Content Is Not Optimized for One.
The core problem the research surfaces is not reach or engagement. It is discoverability. As TikTok has become the default search tool for younger consumers, the content appearing in those results follows different rules than a viral feed post.
“Most of the ranked videos are from nano influencers,” Quirin says, referring to creators with between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. “Super important and relevant.” The implication is that brands optimizing campaigns for follower counts and engagement rates are optimizing for the wrong outcome.
TikTok’s search algorithm rewards keyword specificity and content volume over creator size. Quirin’s team has identified a precise intervention: creator briefs should instruct talent to mention target keywords in the first 10 seconds of a video and in the caption. “You have a higher chance to get ranked,” he says. Most brand briefs do not include that instruction.
The shelf life of search-optimized content also changes the economics. Refluenced’s data includes videos from 2022 still appearing in the top 10 results for competitive keywords. “Before, it was always: we have a social media campaign, it goes from June to August, we need to build awareness,” Quirin says. “Now, it’s really about something more lasting. You build that asset over time.”
The Budget Allocation That the Data Doesn’t Support
The research makes a specific argument about creator tiers. Brands that concentrate influencer spend on macro and celebrity creators are not only paying a premium; they are, in many cases, underperforming on the metric that increasingly determines purchase intent.
“With a lot of smaller creators, you can actually have even bigger impacts than with a single influencer,” Quirin says. The Refluenced marketplace data supports the point from a pricing angle, too. When creators apply to a campaign knowing others are also competing for the placement, rates adjust downward. “With a smaller budget, you can already activate a lot of creators and have a big impact.”
Quirin’s position on macro creators is not categorical. “In the end, it’s always a mix,” he says. “You can have some celebrities talking about your brand, and then you need the bottom of the pyramid, where you activate a lot of creators and gain visibility. The middle path is probably the best way.” The issue, in his framing, is not that brands spend on large names but that most never build the base.
Why? The answer is operational. “Imagine you need to find the creator, do the negotiation, text and communicate with them, then have reporting sent, then send the product,” Quirin explains. “That’s the one big thing currently holding brands back.” Discovery tools solve search. They do not solve the workload that follows. Refluenced inverts the process by having creators apply to standardized campaign terms, reducing that overhead to a single approval decision.
UK Brands Are Ahead. DACH Brands Are Still Asking for Content Approval.
One of the more notable findings from the cross-market analysis is that geography still shapes influencer strategy in meaningful ways, even as the platforms are global.
UK brands have broadly accepted a volume-based model, activating large numbers of creators with relatively loose creative controls. DACH brands, particularly in Germany, maintain tighter oversight, often requiring content approval before posting. The effect is a narrower creator pool and slower campaign execution.
“In Germany, brands are a bit more afraid and are asking for content approval,” Quirin observes. “In the UK, it’s more accepted that more people talking about you is what matters.”
The comparison serves not as a ranking but as a leading indicator. UK Influencer Marketing reflects practices that are spreading into adjacent markets. The shift toward volume, loose creative parameters, and nano-tier activation is, in Quirin’s reading, where the DACH market is heading. “Switzerland is a little bit behind, then Germany, then the UK,” he says. “But surprisingly, there’s no big difference between the markets in terms of what works.”
Consistency Compounds. Virality Does Not.
A secondary finding from Refluenced’s data concerns the relationship between content consistency and long-term brand visibility. As LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from social media to populate answers, the body of content a brand has accumulated on TikTok becomes an asset with uses beyond the platform.
“If you have content with relevant information, you are on the winning side,” Quirin says. “With AI, it will become harder to just have these one-time shots. People are questioning now whether videos are real or not.”
This makes creator selection a longer-term decision than a single campaign brief. According to Quirin, brands prefer to work with influencers who build community consistently rather than those with one or two viral hits, according to the research. Smaller creators also tend to execute more reliably. “With bigger creators, you need to push them, make sure they’re delivering on time,” he explains. “Smaller creators put real effort in because they see it as a career.”
The Metrics That Aren’t in Most Brand Reports
The research also identifies a gap between what brands are measuring and what actually predicts impact. Saves and shares, which signal active intent rather than passive consumption, are underweighted in most reporting dashboards relative to reach and engagement rate. Share of voice, which tracks brand conversation volume against competitors, is similarly underutilized.
“How many people save that content piece or share it? That’s super relevant nowadays,” Quirin says. “And then share of voice: how many people are talking about our brand compared to the competition.”
TikTok’s Spark Ads and Partnership Ads represent a related blind spot. Running paid amplification through a creator’s account, rather than a brand account, consistently performs well in Refluenced’s data, but most brands still default to their own channels.
“There’s still a huge opportunity,” Quirin says. “You don’t run your ads via your own brand account, but in the name of the influencers.”
Refluenced now offers a searchability dashboard that maps a brand’s TikTok keyword rankings against competitors, identifies content gaps, and generates campaign briefs targeting specific terms. The tool reflects a broader argument Quirin makes about how Influencer Marketing is changing: the campaign is no longer the unit of strategy. The keyword ranking is.
Toward One-Person Influencer Operations
The research findings point toward a logical endpoint: Influencer Marketing as a continuous, automated function rather than a series of discrete campaigns. Refluenced’s AI assistant, called LIA, already drafts campaign structures from a PDF brief or prompt, drawing on the platform’s history of completed campaigns.
The company’s next product is an MCP integration that embeds LIA into tools like Claude and ChatGPT, removing the need to switch platforms mid-workflow. Quirin’s vision is a single marketer running a full influencer operation, from creator matching and briefing through content approval and keyword performance tracking, without agency overhead. “You can say to LIA, ‘Build me a campaign on this briefing,’” he explains. “Only if needed does a human need to interact or react to something.”
As the company prepares its U.S. market entry, Quirin expects to find American brands further along in nano-tier adoption but facing the same structural challenge. The 40% invisibility figure may shift, but the underlying dynamic will not: brands that have not built consistent, keyword-optimized creator content at scale are accumulating a search deficit that compounds over time.
“Way more brands will be visible on TikTok” in the U.S., Quirin says, “and some really small brands will have some really high scores and already understand the game.” For the ones that haven’t, he adds, the window to catch up is still open. For now.
Nii A. Ahene is the founder and managing director of Net Influencer, a website dedicated to offering insights into the influencer marketing industry. Together with its newsletter, Influencer Weekly, Net Influencer provides news, commentary, and analysis of the events shaping the creator and influencer marketing space. Through interviews with startups, influencers, brands, and platforms, Nii and his team explore how influencer marketing is being effectively used to benefit businesses and personal brands alike.
Gen Z is quietly replacing Google with TikTok for product discovery, and most brand influencer strategies have not caught up. New research from Refluenced suggests the gap is larger and more actionable than the industry has acknowledged.
The Zurich and Berlin-based marketplace analyzed 50,000 keywords and 160,000 videos across the UK and DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) markets. The finding that defines the study: 40% of brands are effectively invisible on TikTok search. They are not ranking. They are not being found. For a platform where 68% of Gen Z users use TikTok as a search engine daily, that is not a distribution problem. It is an existence problem.
“If you’re not ranked on these keywords, you just don’t exist for these clients,” says Quirin Hasler, co-founder and CEO of Refluenced. “That’s something very concerning.”
Refluenced operates as a marketplace connecting nano and micro influencers with brands through a reverse-application model: creators apply to campaigns rather than waiting for outreach. Founded in 2022, the company reports connecting more than 30,000 creators with brands, completing over 4,000 campaigns, and facilitating CHF 5 million (~6.4M) in product value. The UK and DACH research, released ahead of a planned U.S. expansion at Cannes Lions, draws on that campaign history to identify what is working and what most brands are still getting wrong.
TikTok Is a Search Engine. Most Brand Content Is Not Optimized for One.
The core problem the research surfaces is not reach or engagement. It is discoverability. As TikTok has become the default search tool for younger consumers, the content appearing in those results follows different rules than a viral feed post.
“Most of the ranked videos are from nano influencers,” Quirin says, referring to creators with between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. “Super important and relevant.” The implication is that brands optimizing campaigns for follower counts and engagement rates are optimizing for the wrong outcome.
TikTok’s search algorithm rewards keyword specificity and content volume over creator size. Quirin’s team has identified a precise intervention: creator briefs should instruct talent to mention target keywords in the first 10 seconds of a video and in the caption. “You have a higher chance to get ranked,” he says. Most brand briefs do not include that instruction.
The shelf life of search-optimized content also changes the economics. Refluenced’s data includes videos from 2022 still appearing in the top 10 results for competitive keywords. “Before, it was always: we have a social media campaign, it goes from June to August, we need to build awareness,” Quirin says. “Now, it’s really about something more lasting. You build that asset over time.”
The Budget Allocation That the Data Doesn’t Support
The research makes a specific argument about creator tiers. Brands that concentrate influencer spend on macro and celebrity creators are not only paying a premium; they are, in many cases, underperforming on the metric that increasingly determines purchase intent.
“With a lot of smaller creators, you can actually have even bigger impacts than with a single influencer,” Quirin says. The Refluenced marketplace data supports the point from a pricing angle, too. When creators apply to a campaign knowing others are also competing for the placement, rates adjust downward. “With a smaller budget, you can already activate a lot of creators and have a big impact.”
Quirin’s position on macro creators is not categorical. “In the end, it’s always a mix,” he says. “You can have some celebrities talking about your brand, and then you need the bottom of the pyramid, where you activate a lot of creators and gain visibility. The middle path is probably the best way.” The issue, in his framing, is not that brands spend on large names but that most never build the base.
Why? The answer is operational. “Imagine you need to find the creator, do the negotiation, text and communicate with them, then have reporting sent, then send the product,” Quirin explains. “That’s the one big thing currently holding brands back.” Discovery tools solve search. They do not solve the workload that follows. Refluenced inverts the process by having creators apply to standardized campaign terms, reducing that overhead to a single approval decision.
UK Brands Are Ahead. DACH Brands Are Still Asking for Content Approval.
One of the more notable findings from the cross-market analysis is that geography still shapes influencer strategy in meaningful ways, even as the platforms are global.
UK brands have broadly accepted a volume-based model, activating large numbers of creators with relatively loose creative controls. DACH brands, particularly in Germany, maintain tighter oversight, often requiring content approval before posting. The effect is a narrower creator pool and slower campaign execution.
“In Germany, brands are a bit more afraid and are asking for content approval,” Quirin observes. “In the UK, it’s more accepted that more people talking about you is what matters.”
The comparison serves not as a ranking but as a leading indicator. UK Influencer Marketing reflects practices that are spreading into adjacent markets. The shift toward volume, loose creative parameters, and nano-tier activation is, in Quirin’s reading, where the DACH market is heading. “Switzerland is a little bit behind, then Germany, then the UK,” he says. “But surprisingly, there’s no big difference between the markets in terms of what works.”
Consistency Compounds. Virality Does Not.
A secondary finding from Refluenced’s data concerns the relationship between content consistency and long-term brand visibility. As LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from social media to populate answers, the body of content a brand has accumulated on TikTok becomes an asset with uses beyond the platform.
“If you have content with relevant information, you are on the winning side,” Quirin says. “With AI, it will become harder to just have these one-time shots. People are questioning now whether videos are real or not.”
This makes creator selection a longer-term decision than a single campaign brief. According to Quirin, brands prefer to work with influencers who build community consistently rather than those with one or two viral hits, according to the research. Smaller creators also tend to execute more reliably. “With bigger creators, you need to push them, make sure they’re delivering on time,” he explains. “Smaller creators put real effort in because they see it as a career.”
The Metrics That Aren’t in Most Brand Reports
The research also identifies a gap between what brands are measuring and what actually predicts impact. Saves and shares, which signal active intent rather than passive consumption, are underweighted in most reporting dashboards relative to reach and engagement rate. Share of voice, which tracks brand conversation volume against competitors, is similarly underutilized.
“How many people save that content piece or share it? That’s super relevant nowadays,” Quirin says. “And then share of voice: how many people are talking about our brand compared to the competition.”
TikTok’s Spark Ads and Partnership Ads represent a related blind spot. Running paid amplification through a creator’s account, rather than a brand account, consistently performs well in Refluenced’s data, but most brands still default to their own channels.
“There’s still a huge opportunity,” Quirin says. “You don’t run your ads via your own brand account, but in the name of the influencers.”
Refluenced now offers a searchability dashboard that maps a brand’s TikTok keyword rankings against competitors, identifies content gaps, and generates campaign briefs targeting specific terms. The tool reflects a broader argument Quirin makes about how Influencer Marketing is changing: the campaign is no longer the unit of strategy. The keyword ranking is.
Toward One-Person Influencer Operations
The research findings point toward a logical endpoint: Influencer Marketing as a continuous, automated function rather than a series of discrete campaigns. Refluenced’s AI assistant, called LIA, already drafts campaign structures from a PDF brief or prompt, drawing on the platform’s history of completed campaigns.
The company’s next product is an MCP integration that embeds LIA into tools like Claude and ChatGPT, removing the need to switch platforms mid-workflow. Quirin’s vision is a single marketer running a full influencer operation, from creator matching and briefing through content approval and keyword performance tracking, without agency overhead. “You can say to LIA, ‘Build me a campaign on this briefing,’” he explains. “Only if needed does a human need to interact or react to something.”
As the company prepares its U.S. market entry, Quirin expects to find American brands further along in nano-tier adoption but facing the same structural challenge. The 40% invisibility figure may shift, but the underlying dynamic will not: brands that have not built consistent, keyword-optimized creator content at scale are accumulating a search deficit that compounds over time.
“Way more brands will be visible on TikTok” in the U.S., Quirin says, “and some really small brands will have some really high scores and already understand the game.” For the ones that haven’t, he adds, the window to catch up is still open. For now.
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