Search Console now shows visits from photo searches
A new filter separates people who searched with a camera or a screenshot from people who typed words.
Google Search Console, Google's free tool for site owners, now splits your web traffic into two kinds. Open the Performance report and click the Search type filter, and the old "Web" option is now "Text-based" and "Multimodal". Multimodal means the search started with a picture instead of typed words.
Brodie Clark says that in practice this lets you separate visits that came from Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, images uploaded to Google Search, and the right-click "Search this image" option in Chrome. Google's own definition, as quoted by Brodie Clark, is that "Web-multimodal tracks search results triggered by a query that uses an image, photo, or screenshot."
Web-multimodal tracks search results triggered by a query that uses an image, photo, or screenshot.
It is data you have never seen before
This is not a case of Google slicing up numbers you already had. Barry Schwartz reports that Google's John Mueller clarified the multimodal figures are new data, and were never previously reported by being lumped in with web results. So your totals may look slightly higher than before, and that is the reason.
There is one gap. Brodie Clark points out there is no query data for multimodal traffic, because these searches use images rather than text. You get impressions, clicks and average position, but not the words people searched. There is oddly still a column for queries, according to Brodie Clark, but Google's docs say the dimension is not available for this search type.
The filter also works inside the generative AI performance report, per Barry Schwartz, and Google announced the change itself.
Who should care
If people point a camera at the thing you sell, this matters most. Brodie Clark lists products, packaging, screenshots, plants, parts and artwork as the kinds of things that get photographed and searched. Until now, visual search has been unclear in Search Console, so nobody knew how big that channel was for their own site.
It is rolling out gradually. Brodie Clark says he is now seeing it on several accounts, so yours may not have it yet.
Open Search Console, go to the Performance report, click the Search type filter, and look for Multimodal. If it is there, set the date range to the last three months and compare the click count against Text-based. If multimodal is a real share of your clicks, that is a sign your images are doing work, which is a reason to keep photos clear, well named and not buried behind scripts. If the filter has not arrived or the numbers are near zero, do nothing and check again in a few weeks.