On September 24, 2026, Google announced a new way to see how your website performs in image-based search — a “multimodal” filter inside Google Search Console. It is a narrow, technical-sounding update, but it answers a question SEO teams have not been able to answer directly until now: how much of your traffic comes from someone pointing a phone camera at a product, or circling something on their screen, rather than typing a query.
Google’s own Search Central Blog post confirms the new filter appears inside the existing Performance report for Search results, under the “Web” search type, and inside the Generative AI features report. It separates “text-based” search traffic from “multimodal” traffic — search activity initiated through an image rather than typed text. Google states plainly that the feature is “designed to give you insights into how your content is surfaced when users search using images (such as a smartphone camera).”
Per Google’s announcement, multimodal search traffic includes:
The common thread: the search started from a picture, not typed words — which is precisely why the reporting works differently from Search Console’s familiar query-based reports.
The filter shows which of your pages receive multimodal traffic, broken down by country and device, and lets you compare that against your text-based Web traffic side by side. What it does not show is specific text query data for that traffic — because, as Google explains, “multimodal searches mostly use images rather than text,” there is no query string to report in the way a typed search produces one.
A few practical limitations are worth knowing before you go looking for this data:
This feature does not create image-based search — Lens, Circle to Search, and image upload already existed. What it does is give site owners, for the first time, direct visibility into how much of their traffic already comes through that path. For categories where a product is highly visual and recognizable at a glance — fashion, jewelry, watches, home decor, packaged FMCG with distinctive branding — this is a genuinely useful new data point, not a vanity metric. A brand that has never optimized product photography or image metadata with search visibility in mind may discover a meaningful share of traffic is already arriving this way.
With Durga Puja and Diwali both inside the next six weeks, screenshotting a product seen on social media or a friend’s post, then searching it, is a realistic and common festive shopping behavior. This is a high-confidence trend, not a Google-confirmed statistic — no official data ties this specific feature launch to festive shopping behavior in India — but the underlying behavioral pattern (visual product discovery spiking around gifting season) is well established.
This feature arrives alongside a wider pattern this project has tracked through 2026: Google steadily adding new, narrower measurement surfaces (platform properties for social content in July, and now multimodal reporting for image-initiated search) rather than one unified “AI search performance” dashboard. Each addition answers one specific question well — this one answers “how much of my traffic starts with an image” — but none of them yet gives a single, complete picture of how a brand shows up across text search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and now image-based discovery. Site owners should expect this incremental, feature-by-feature rollout pattern to continue, and plan to check Search Console’s release notes periodically rather than assuming today’s reporting is the finished picture.
Google has not stated how large a share of overall search traffic multimodal search represents, globally or in India specifically, nor has it published India-specific adoption data for Lens or Circle to Search. Treat any specific percentage claim about “how much search is now visual” that does not cite this or another named, verifiable source with caution.
How much of their traffic comes from someone pointing a phone camera at a product, or circling something on their screen, instead of typing a search. Here’s what the new Search Console “multimodal” filter actually shows — and what it still doesn’t.
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