People use TikTok to look things up: restaurants, products, travel, how to do something. TikTok has built an ad business around that, and in 2026 it added brand pages at the top of search results. For Gulf agencies the details matter, because the most controllable form of TikTok search advertising is available in Saudi Arabia but, according to TikTok's own list, not yet in the UAE.
Two ways to appear in search
Automatic Search Placement, which TikTok used to call the search ads toggle, extends ordinary in-feed ads to the search results page and the search feed. It is switched on by default, available globally and bought in the auction. It works with most objectives, including reach, video views, traffic, app promotion, lead generation and website sales, and it supports negative keywords, so a brand can keep its ads away from searches that do not fit.
The Search Ads campaign is the keyword campaign: ads that appear only on the search results page, for keywords the advertiser chooses. It launched in the US in September 2024. TikTok's availability page, last updated in April 2026, lists the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Australia. In Saudi Arabia it supports the website conversion and traffic objectives. The UAE and the other Gulf countries are not on the list.
How the keyword campaigns work
- Match types are broad, phrase and exact, and can be changed while a campaign runs.
- Each ad group takes up to 1,000 keywords and 10,000 negative keywords.
- A keyword suggestion tool, a search terms report and an automated keyword option help build and prune the list.
- Formats are video ads, carousel image ads, and search catalogue ads for sales and travel.
- TikTok's launch guidance suggested a budget of about 20 times the bid.
TikTok's July 2026 preview said Smart+, its automated campaign type, is expanding to Search Ads campaigns. It gave no date or market list.
Search Hubs: owning the top of the results
Announced at TikTok World in May 2026, a Search Hub is a brand-owned page at the very top of search results. Branded Search Hubs, for a brand's own name, are generally available; category hubs are in beta, and sponsor hubs for big cultural moments in alpha. They are sold through TikTok's sales team, not bought in Ads Manager, and TikTok said in June that they were available across the Middle East and North Africa. A companion product, Keyword Amplifier, adds clickable searches to creator videos that lead into the hub.
The regional example is Visit Saudi, which TikTok says was the first advertiser in the region with a Branded Search Hub. It also ran search ads on terms such as travel to Jeddah and tourism in AlUla, and TikTok reports more than 1.5 million hub page views and 18 million engagements.
The search numbers, and the ones to avoid
TikTok's own figures are these:
- Billions of searches a day, up more than 40 percent year on year, and one in four users searching within 30 seconds of opening the app (June 2025).
- A purchase lift twice as high when a campaign includes dedicated search ads (September 2025).
- From a WARC study that TikTok cites: 86 percent of Gen Z internet users search on TikTok every week.
Several figures that appear in pitch decks cannot be traced to TikTok. The claim that 49 percent of US consumers use TikTok as a search engine comes from Adobe. The figure of 89.4 percent of Saudis using it as a search engine comes from an academic survey. Claims that searches rose 174 percent, or that 40 percent of UAE Gen Z prefer TikTok to Google, have no source we could find. TikTok has not published a search statistic dated 2026.
What to do with it
- Leave automatic search placement on for most campaigns, and add negative keywords for searches the brand should not appear on.
- In Saudi Arabia, test a keyword Search Ads campaign on high-intent terms: the brand name, product categories and comparisons.
- In the UAE, rely on automatic placement and on creator content that people find through search, until TikTok adds the market.
- Make creative that answers the search. A video that shows the product doing what someone searched for works better in results than a brand film.
- Review the search terms report every week, as you would on Google.
The free caption and hashtag checker on this site checks captions against each platform's limits, which matters on TikTok, where people find videos by searching words.
