Google Search Console now shows image search traffic

Picture a customer standing in front of a broken coffee machine. A few years ago they would have taken a photograph, or written down the technical details, gone back to their computer and typed whatever code they managed to read into Google. Today they photograph the machine with their phone and get a list of suppliers within seconds. If your web shop is on that list, there is a good chance you will receive an enquiry or even made a sale. Until now, you had no way of knowing whether you were on it (result on image search).

On 24 September 2026 that changed. Google announced on its official blog for site owners that Google Search Console is adding reporting for multimodal web search. These are searches where the user sends an image instead of typing text. The data appears in the search performance report and in the report for generative artificial intelligence features.

What multimodal search means

Multimodal search means that the user shows the search engine a picture instead of typing keywords. The word multimodal means more than one way of entering a query. Classic search knows one way only, and that is typed keywords. With multimodal search the user can send a photograph, a screenshot or part of a screen. Sometimes they combine the image with a question.

An everyday example: instead of typing "electric lawnmower for the garden" into the search box, you simply photograph one. Google recognises the kind of product and shows you suppliers.

What Google counts

The new filter covers four ways of searching that people already use, mostly without thinking about it.

• Google Lens, which means searching through the camera or through a photograph already stored on the phone.
• Circle to Search on Android devices, where the user draws a circle around part of the screen with a finger and gets results straight away.
• Uploading an image directly into Google Search.
• Searching for an image with a right click in the Chrome browser.

All of this was happening before. The difference is that these visits were mixed in with ordinary search results, so you could not separate them from text queries. The performance report now has a new search type filter that splits web search with text from web search with an image.

Google says the feature is rolling out globally, and that you will start to see measurements as soon as your site receives this kind of visit. If you cannot see the filter yet, it most likely means that Google has not recorded this traffic for your domain, or that the rollout has not reached your account.

What the report does not show

For multimodal search, the query dimension is not available. The reason is logical, because the user typed no words at all and sent a photograph instead. You will not see which keywords triggered the impression, and you will not see the photograph the person used to search.

This means you cannot optimise this kind of traffic with keyword research. You optimise it with tidy images, tidy product data, and with how well Google understands what is on your website.

Why this matters for your business

For many companies, image search is the largest unused channel. This is most obvious for web shops selling technical goods, spare parts, building materials, furniture, clothing and anything that is easier to show than to describe. The buyer often does not know the name of the product. They do know what it looks like, or they are standing in front of it.

Think of a garden machinery retailer in Slovenia with fifteen thousand products in its catalogue. Service technicians in the field photograph worn parts and look for replacements. If the product photographs in the shop are good quality, taken from several angles and described correctly, Google will be able to connect a photograph taken in the field with the product page. If the shop has one small image on a grey background with the file name IMG_4471, that will not happen.

Until now this could not be measured. From this week it can.

The same applies to property, hospitality, tourism and every business where the buyer decides with their eyes. The new data shows whether your visual content is doing its job at all.

What to do in the next few weeks

Step one: open the report

Open Google Search Console, go to the performance report and check whether the search type filter now offers image search. If it does, note the number of impressions and clicks, and look at which pages appear.

Step two: review your images

This is not about aesthetics, it is about technical tidiness. Every important image needs a sensible file name, descriptive alternative text (ALT) and a suitable format, which is part of ordinary search engine optimisation.

Step three: add structured data

Google needs to know that the image shows a product, and that the product has a name, a price and stock. Without this, a photograph is just one more file that the search engine cannot interpret.

Step four: check the product page

A visitor who arrives through a photograph intends to buy now. If they land on a page with no price, no stock and no clear button, you have wasted the visit and lost the visitor.

How we help at Kabi

We build websites and web shops on our own CMS platform, so converting images into modern formats, creating several sizes automatically and built-in structured data are not extras you have to order separately. They are part of the system. In web shop development this means that every product starts with structured data the search engine understands.

In shops with a large catalogue, content is often a bigger problem than technology. Photographs arrive from several suppliers, descriptions are inconsistent, and the same product has three different names. This is exactly what Product Information Management (PIM) sorts out. It collects product data and images in one place and sends them out in a single consistent form to your shop and to other channels.

If you want someone to review your Google Search Console data regularly and connect it to sales, our SEO Optimization Services and Web analytics are available to you.

What to remember

Google's change is not an algorithm update and it will not lower anyone's rankings overnight. It is confirmation that search with a camera has become large enough to deserve its own measurement. Companies that start watching this number now will know something in six months that their competitors will not.

Companies that never open the report will carry on guessing where their buyers come from.

If you want us to review your site and tell you whether it is ready for visitors who arrive through photographs, get in touch with us.