Search Console finally shows searches made with an image

Pointing your phone at a pair of shoes, circling an object on the screen, dropping a photo into the search bar: searching with an image has become an everyday habit. Until now, those visits blended into the rest of your traffic, with no way to tell them apart. On September 24, 2026, Google announced that Search Console now shows them separately, with a new “multimodal” filter.

What Google announced

The announcement comes from the official Google Search Central blog¹, signed by the product leads of Google Lens and Search Console. The stated goal: understand how content is found when people search with an image, for example with their smartphone camera.

Four ways of searching are counted: Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search and the “Search this image” right-click in Chrome. To see them, pick the new “multimodal” search type filter in the performance reports. The “Export” button lets you pull the numbers and cross them with your other tools.

The rollout started the same day, worldwide. Google notes that the numbers only appear if your site already gets traffic from these searches: an empty filter may simply mean nobody finds you through an image yet.

Just one more filter? Not really

The filter sits in two places, and that is no accident. It shows up in the classic Search results report, but also in the Generative AI features report, the one that tracks AI Overviews and AI Mode. Image search and generated answers move forward together: a photo sent to Google may well get an answer written by AI rather than a list of links.

For a business, this means part of its visibility now depends on its images as much as on its text. And that part becomes measurable.

What it changes for you

• An online store learns whether its photos sell. A customer photographs a product seen in a shop or at a friend’s place and looks for where to buy it. If your product pages come up, you now see it in black and white.
• A retailer or brand spots its recognizable products. The pages receiving this traffic show which items people identify by their looks alone.
• A marketing team decides on facts. Redoing a photo shoot, polishing the visuals of a product line or a website: the effect can now be tracked in a dedicated report instead of guessed.
• AI visibility reads more precisely. In the Generative AI report, the filter separates what comes from an image from what comes from a typed question.

As with any new chart, caution still applies: a rise alone does not prove a change worked. The control group method, detailed in our article on AI visibility in Search Console, applies here too.

What it does not solve

Search Console only covers Google. Image searches made in other apps stay outside this report, as do competing AI assistants, whose measurement still calls for the protocol described in our article on measuring AI visibility.

The progress is real all the same: a channel that grew in the dark finally has its numbers. Businesses that look at them now will learn faster whether their images are working for them.

Sources

1. Https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/09/web-multimodal-in-sc (new tab)developers.google.com