Google Just Made Image-Based Search Visible in Search Console — And SEO Will Never Be Text-Only Again
For years, if someone pointed their phone camera at your product and landed on your website, Search Console counted it the same as someone typing a keyword. You couldn't tell the difference.
On September 24, 2026, Google changed that. Search Console now has a "Web: multimodal" filter that separates image-led searches from text-based ones.
Here's what you need to know:
→ It covers four entry points: Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome's right-click "Search this image"
→ It works in both the standard Search Performance report and the Generative AI features report, so you can also see impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode for image-led searches
→ It's rolling out globally, and data is available from September 10 onward
→ You can filter by page, country, device, and date, and export the data
There are limits worth knowing before you get excited:
→ Query data isn't available. You can see which pages got the traffic, but not what the image actually showed
→ The four sources are grouped together, so you can't separate Lens from Circle to Search
→ Clicks from the Images tab aren't counted here. They stay in the regular image search type
→ Google hasn't published a new optimization checklist. This is measurement, not a ranking change
Here's my take: the real value is in the comparison. Filter by multimodal, group by page, and compare that list against your text-based pages. Any page that shows up mainly through images and not keywords is telling you something new, that its visuals, alt text, and markup now have a measurable return. For retailers, travel sites, and local businesses, product photography and original images stop being a supporting asset and start being an entry point.
It also fits a bigger shift. Search is no longer only "type and read." People point, circle, and snap. Until now, that behavior was invisible in our reports. Now it's a line item, and what gets measured is what gets optimized.
If you manage a site, check whether your Search Console property already shows the new filter, and look at which pages are getting image-led traffic before your competitors do.
Are you already seeing Lens or Circle to Search traffic on your site — and were you surprised by which pages it landed on?
#SEO #GoogleSearchConsole #VisualSearch #GoogleLens #DigitalMarketing #SearchEngineOptimization