Search Console now reports multimodal search: Lens, Circle to Search and image uploads
On 24 September Google switched on multimodal search reporting in Search Console — the kind of search done with a camera or a picture. The data covers Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads to Google Search and the Chrome "Search this image" item. You view it through a new search type filter, added to both the performance report and the generative AI report. Here is what it changes.
On 24 September Google switched on multimodal search reporting in Search Console — the kind of search where a person looks something up with a camera or a picture rather than with words. The data appears both in the ordinary performance report and in the report for generative AI features, and the rollout is global and started on announcement day. Here is what went in and what to do about it.
What was announced
"Today, we are excited to introduce Search Console reporting for web multimodal search, in the report for performance on Search results as well as in the report for Generative AI features. This update is designed to give you insights into how your content is surfaced when users search using images (such as with a smartphone camera)."
Google Search Central Blog, 24 September 2026By "multimodal search" Google means a specific set of scenarios, and it lists them outright:
To see the data you use a new search type filter — the multimodal one — which works exactly like the familiar Web, Image, Video and News filters. The Export button is available as well.
When the data shows up
Google says the integration is rolling out globally starting on announcement day, and that you will see the metrics if your site is receiving traffic from such queries. So an empty filter is not a malfunction: it means you have no visual traffic yet, or it sits below the display threshold.
This is the third expansion of Search Console reporting this year: the generative AI reports arrived in June, on 31 August they reached every site worldwide, and now a multimodal cut has been added to them. The direction is unmistakable — Google is gradually showing how content behaves beyond the classic list of blue links.
What it changes in practice
The main thing is that something previously guessable has become measurable. Before this update visual traffic dissolved into the general mass, and the question "do people reach us through Lens" had no answer.
Two practical steps follow. First: find out whether you have that traffic at all and which pages it lands on. Second: compare that list with the pages you considered your visually strong ones. The divergence is usually the interesting part — it often turns out that what gets found is not what was promoted.
And one caveat that saves time: Google has not described any separate "optimisation for multimodal search". The requirements for images are the same as before, collected in its image guidelines. The new report gives you measurement, not a new channel.
On images, while we are here: what our own data shows
Since the subject is visual, here is a fresh measurement from our own audit database: 132 projects, 86,754 crawled pages, a little over two million images.
The good news: alt text is in better shape than people assume. Only 8.3% of images have no alt, and on 63.8% of pages with images every single one carries alt text. Pages where alt is missing everywhere account for under one percent.
In other words the baseline is covered on most sites. The difference between sites is no longer whether alt exists but whether it describes the image meaningfully — and that is something the new report finally lets you check against data rather than by eye.
What to do this week
- Open the performance report in Search Console and switch on the search type filter. See whether there are multimodal impressions and which pages they belong to.
- If there is data, export it and compare the list of pages with your usual top performers. The divergences matter, not the overlap.
- If there is no data, that is normal and needs no action. Check again in a month.
- While you are at it, review the
alttext on the pages that matter to you. Not whether it exists — what it actually says.
The crawl reports images without alt and the rest of the technical findings, split by severity.
Sources
Google Search Central Blog, "Announcing web multimodal Search performance reporting in Search Console", 24 September 2026: what the data covers, the search type filter, the global rollout. Written by Harsh Kharbanda (Product Manager Lead, Google Lens) and Moshe Samet (Product Manager Lead, Search Console).
Google Search Console Help, the generative AI performance report: the metrics it carries and the rollout to all sites as of 31 August 2026.
PromoPilot's own measurement, September 2026: 132 projects, 86,754 pages answering with a 200, and 2,015,357 images in the SEO Audit database.
