TikTok is the new Google for product discovery. If your video ranks in search, you get people who have high buying intent see your product — simple as that.

Brands like yours are noticing this, but there is no existing study that provides any sort of benchmark to help you build your strategy. Until today.

I analyzed engagement metrics and video metadata (e.g. descriptions, hashtags) for ~8000 purchase-intent TikTok searches.

This article shows what “good” looks like — broken down by engagement rate, and sliced by follower size.

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Let’s get to the point: do viral videos rank on TikTok Search Results?

The answer is.. not really.

In our dataset, only 35% of top ranked videos could be considered viral, defined as videos with views 10x higher than the number of followers of the profile that posted them.

That’s quite low for a platform mostly known for virality, trends and short-lived videos.

In addition, we found that TikTok search results are quite sticky, and are ranked up to 2-3 years after they are posted (surprising, right?). In our research, we see that almost half of product-related search results were posted more than a year ago.

If TikTok is not picking viral videos to show on search results, then what is it looking at?

My analysis suggests that there are two core drivers of TikTok search ranking:

• Engagement dimensions
• Video content/metadata

Engagement dimensions

General engagement is not fundamental to rank on TikTok Search, but saves might be

0. How engagement rate is calculated for TikTok Search Results

Typically, there are two ways to calculate engagement rate, depending on what you are interested in.

If you want to assess how well a creator is doing, often you’ll compute the engagement rate on a profile-level, by adding up saves, likes, comments and shares from all videos of the creator and dividing the sum by the number of followers.

Alternatively, if you want to assess how well a specific video is doing, you can calculate the engagement rate as the sum of saves, likes, comments and shares, and divide it by the number of views.

In our case, we look at the latter definition of engagement rate, to understand what engagement looks like for videos that rank on TikTok search results.

1. What’s a Good Engagement Rate on TikTok Search?

The average engagement rates (per view) across all top-ranking videos:

Quick takeaways:

• Engagement rate per video averages 3.48%. The median value is 2.61%. You don’t need a viral spike to be above average. Even a 4% engagement rate puts you ahead of most ranked content.
• Engagement Composition: The majority of engagements are likes (2.53%), followed by saves (0.56%) and shares (0.20%), with comments being relatively rare (0.06%). This distribution suggests that while viewers are inclined to express approval through likes, deeper interactions like comments are less common in search-ranked content.
• Saves are a strong signal: Most industry reports ignore save rate, but we find that it is the second most frequent engagement type for top ranked videos (after likes), and appears to be a strong signal for ranking on search results.

2. Performance by Follower Size

How do small vs. large accounts perform in TikTok search?

Key findings:

• Engagement rate increases steadily with follower size — indicating that top-ranked videos in TikTok search benefit from not just content quality, but likely also creator authority.
• Even the lowest tier (1–5K followers) sees engagement above 2.5%, which is competitive relative to broader platform averages.

For a detailed breakdown of all engagement metrics, see our 2025 TikTok Search Ranking Report.

3. So… What Should You Aim For?

Here’s a simple performance tier to benchmark your own videos:

Use this to evaluate the current performance of your brand’s videos. Or as a target if you're trying to rank on TikTok search results.

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Video Content and Metadata

Short videos with long descriptions and more hashtags might help smaller profiles rank higher, but what you write matters even more

In addition to engagement rate, I analyzed the structure of videos appearing in the top 10 search result positions, focusing on average description length, video duration, and hashtag usage. Here's how these elements vary by creator size:

Key takeaways:

• Smaller creators tend to write longer descriptions and use more hashtags — likely to maximize visibility and keyword relevance, since they have lower authority.
• Video duration increases with creator size, peaking in the 100K–1M range, possibly reflecting more polished, higher-effort content that holds attention longer.
• Top-tier creators (1M+) use fewer hashtags and shorter descriptions, suggesting they rely more on brand recognition/authority than video metadata.

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Want to know what this means for your brand?

For a full breakdown of all engagement metrics, profile size and a deep analysis of how to use specific keywords in your content to rank on TikTok search results, read our TikTok Search Ranking for Brands in 2025 report.

Read the Full Report →

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Methodology

• I used our app to track the top 10 videos ranking on search results for around 8000 product-related searches. Think of “best cat food brand”, or “cheap airfryer for home”.
• Each search belonged to one of 10 ecommerce categories (beauty, tech, wellness, etc.).
• For every video, I analyzed the following metrics to see what correlated with ranking:
  • View count
  • Likes, shares, saves, comments
  • Poster’s follower count
  • Description length
  • Hashtags count

In my full report, I also look in more depth at how using the target keyword in certain ways influences ranking, or how profile size impacts search result position.