A reader points a camera at a product, circles an object on a screen or uploads a picture. Until now, that path into a website was difficult to isolate in Search Console. Google is starting to make it visible.
Google announced a web multimodal search type filter for the Search Console Performance reports on September 24. It appears in both the Search results report and the Generative AI features report. Google says the underlying searches include Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, images uploaded to Search and Chrome’s right-click “Search this image” action. The rollout is global, but a property will show data only if it receives matching traffic.
What the new filter answers
The immediate question is not “Does Google understand my images?” It is “Do image-led searches produce measurable exposure and visits for this site?” In a Performance report, a publisher can select the multimodal search type, then examine clicks, impressions, click-through rate and pages over time. Google also says the filtered data can be exported for analysis elsewhere.
That gives image-heavy publishers a more useful comparison. A recipe site, for example, can distinguish an image-led route to a recipe from ordinary typed Web searches. A retailer can see whether product pages surface when people search with photos. Those examples are possible uses of the report, not evidence that any particular site has gained traffic.
This is separate from the Search Console controls for AI visibility. One helps measure how searchers arrive; the other concerns how site owners manage AI-related use of their content. Treating both as a single “AI search” metric would hide the behavior this new filter is meant to reveal.
Google’s Performance report documentation explains that clicks and impressions are reporting metrics. They are not a score for image quality. A page with many multimodal impressions but few clicks may need a closer look at the result it presents and the searcher’s intent. A page with no data might simply have no eligible traffic yet.
A useful first check for publishers
Save a baseline for the same date range in ordinary Web results, then switch to the new multimodal filter. Export the page-level results and identify which URLs appear in the new view. If those pages rely on original photos, diagrams or product images, review whether the image and surrounding page clearly explain the subject. Repeat the export after the rollout settles instead of treating the first day’s partial data as a trend.
The work after that is familiar to anyone following a sound SEO research and content workflow: investigate the query and page together, then make a useful change you can measure. Do not rewrite a page merely because a new filter has appeared in the menu.
This is an analytics addition, not a declared Search algorithm update. Google has not said the filter itself changes rankings or that every site will see numbers. Its value is narrower and more practical: it gives editors and site owners a way to measure a search behavior that was previously harder to separate.
Sources: Google Search Central announcement; Search Console Performance report help.
