Google Adds Multimodal Search Reporting Filter to Search Console
Google is giving website owners a new way to separate visual search traffic from regular web searches inside Search Console, a change that could make it easier for publishers and SEO teams to understand how people are finding their content.
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Google announced Thursday that Search Console now includes reporting for web multimodal searches in its Search performance reports. The same search type can be viewed in Google's Generative AI performance report. The rollout starts globally on September 24.
For site owners, the practical value is simple: instead of treating every web search as the same type of activity, Search Console can now identify traffic from searches where an image, photo, or a screenshot was part of the query.
Google's documentation defines web multimodal search as web search results where an image was used as part of the search.
The new category filter in Search Console includes searches made through Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome's right-click "Search this image" feature.
A new filter separates visual searches from text searches
The new data appears through a multimodal search type filter in the Search performance report. Site owners can use it to isolate this traffic from traditional text-based web searches.
Google's Search Console documentation now separates web search into two categories:
- Web: text-based covers traditional searches entered into Google's standard search box.
- Web: multimodal covers web results where an image was used as part of the search.
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The existing performance metrics remain part of the analysis, including clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position. Search Console can also group performance by queries, pages, countries, devices and dates, giving publishers several ways to study the new traffic segment.
That matters because visual search is not just another traffic label. A person searching with a camera or image can arrive at a page through a very different path from someone typing a conventional keyword.
Search Console can now show where multimodal traffic is landing
Google says the new reporting is meant to help publishers understand how their content is surfaced when people search using images.
For a publisher, that creates a useful second layer of search analysis.
A page might perform well for a conventional query such as a product name, topic or how-to phrase, yet receive a separate stream of visitors from users who began their search with an image. Filtering the report makes it easier to see whether that visual traffic is producing impressions and clicks, which pages receive it, and which queries are associated with those visits.
The data can be exported from Search Console, allowing publishers to take it into spreadsheets, reporting systems or other SEO analysis tools.
That export option could be especially useful for larger sites tracking hundreds or thousands of pages. Teams can compare multimodal search performance against standard web search data and look for pages that behave differently across the two.
Why this could change how webmasters optimize content
The biggest value of the update may not be the new filter itself. It is the extra context it gives publishers about how users discover a page.
For years, SEO analysis has centered heavily on typed keywords. Search Console already provides query data showing which searches are connected with impressions and clicks. The new multimodal category adds another way to separate those results and study search behavior.
That can help webmasters spot patterns that are easy to miss in an unfiltered report.
A publisher covering products, food, fashion, travel, vehicles, design, repairs or visual how-to topics, for example, may find that certain pages attract users through image-based searches even when their traditional keyword traffic looks modest.
That information can influence more than search optimization. It can shape the page itself.
A site owner could use the data to examine whether the page gives users enough visual detail, whether images answer the likely question, whether important information is easy to find after the visitor arrives, and whether the content matches what someone using an image to search is actually trying to find.
This is where Google's new reporting may prove useful for creating more helpful pages rather than simply chasing another set of keywords.
The query data could give SEO teams more clues
There is another practical angle for SEO teams.
Search Console's performance reports can group data by queries, so publishers can examine the search terms connected with their pages alongside the new multimodal search filter.
That does not mean Google is showing every detail about the image a person used, nor does the report reveal a user's full search journey. The documented feature is a reporting category for web results where an image formed part of the search.
Still, separating this traffic could help publishers understand whether certain topics are being discovered through visual search and which queries are associated with those visits.
For sites trying to build visibility around a particular subject, that can reveal gaps between what people type and what they appear to search for with images.
Google is extending search reporting as search itself changes
The update comes as Google continues adding new reporting around newer search experiences.
Search Console's Generative AI performance report, which Google says has been rolled out worldwide, already lets site owners examine impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode. That report now includes the same web text-based and web multimodal search type distinction.
Google says the multimodal reporting will appear in the Performance report for sites receiving traffic from these searches. Sites without qualifying traffic may not see meaningful metrics yet.
For webmasters, that makes this more than a new reporting checkbox. It gives them a cleaner way to filter search activity and ask a useful question: Are people finding this page because they typed something, or because they showed Google something?
That distinction can help publishers connect search behavior with page design, visual content and user intent.
As image based search becomes a larger part of how people discover information, having that data inside Search Console gives webmasters a more practical way to study those visits and make changes based on what users are actually doing.
