Since 24 September 2026, Google Search Console can show you something it never did before: traffic from people who searched with an image instead of words. Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads and Chrome's "Search this image" now have their own filter. For bloggers and small publishers, it answers a question that was pure guesswork until last month: are my photos and diagrams bringing in readers? Here is what the report shows, what it does not, and whether you should change anything.
What changed
Google announced web multimodal search performance reporting on its Search Central blog. In the Performance report, the "Web" search type now splits into two options, as Search Engine Roundtable describes:
Text-based: the classic typed searches.
Multimodal: searches started from an image, through Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome's right-click "Search this image".
According to PPC Land, the filter appears in both the standard Search results report and the generative AI performance report, and this multimodal traffic was not previously counted in your web totals. The rollout is global and gradual, so if you do not see the option yet, check again in a few days.
The big limitation: no queries
Here is the catch, in Google's words: "Because multimodal searches mostly use images rather than text, specific text query data isn't available for this traffic." When you select Multimodal, the Queries tab disappears.
You still get pages, countries, devices, dates, impressions, clicks and average position. So you can see which of your pages are found through image searches, but not what people pointed their camera at. Treat it as a map of where image demand lands on your site, not a keyword tool.
Why writers should care
Visual search is not a niche. Before this update, Google had said Lens handled about 20 billion searches a month (as of October 2024), per PPC Land, with roughly a fifth of them shopping-related. Recipe, craft, travel, plant care, DIY and fashion blogs are obvious winners. But anyone who publishes original diagrams, screenshots of tools, or photos of real places has a stake.
The honest counterpoint: for many text-heavy blogs, the multimodal numbers will be tiny. That is useful to know too. It tells you not to spend a week on image SEO for a site whose readers arrive by typing questions.
How to read your multimodal data in 15 minutes
Set the date range to "since 24 September" and select Web, then Multimodal.
Open the Pages tab. Sort by clicks. Write down your top ten pages.
Look at what images those pages carry. Since you cannot see queries, the images themselves are your best clue to what people searched for.
Compare impressions with clicks. Lots of impressions with few clicks may mean your image is shown but the result does not tempt people to visit.
Check the device split. Circle to Search is Android-only, so mobile will likely dominate. Make sure those pages load fast and read well on a phone.
What to actually improve
Google's own image SEO best practices have not changed, and they are still the right starting point. The ones that matter most for writers:
Use real
<img>elements. Google says it does not index CSS background images. Some blog themes put hero images in CSS; check yours.Write useful alt text. Google's example:
alt="Dalmatian puppy playing fetch". Describe what is in the image, plainly. Keyword-stuffed alt text helps nobody.Name files descriptively.
masala-chai-ingredients.jpgbeatsIMG00023.JPG.Place images next to the text they illustrate. Google uses the surrounding content to understand the image.
Use sharp, original images. Google notes that high-quality images increase the chance of traffic. Original photos also give your page something a stock image on a hundred other sites cannot.
Support responsive images with
srcsetor<picture>, and use a supported format such as WebP or AVIF to keep pages fast.
What is overrated here
Expect a wave of "optimise for visual search" advice in the next few weeks. Some of it will be useful. Some will be the usual repackaging. Three things to be sceptical of:
Rewriting all your alt text at once. Fix your top pages first, then see whether the multimodal numbers move.
Adding images for the sake of it. A generic stock photo is unlikely to be what someone pointed Lens at. One original photo is worth more than five filler images.
Treating this as a new ranking factor. It is a reporting change. Google started showing data it already had. Nothing about how pages rank was announced.
A simple plan for the next month
Week 1: record your multimodal baseline (clicks and top pages).
Week 2: fix image basics on your top ten multimodal pages: real
<img>tags, alt text, filenames, placement.Week 3: for one or two posts, replace stock images with original photos or diagrams.
Week 4: compare against the baseline. Keep doing what moved the numbers; drop what did not.
The value of this update is not that image search is suddenly new. It is that you can finally measure it, which means you can stop guessing whether your images are earning their place on the page.
