Search Console now shows image-led searches separately

When someone snaps a photo of a dish, a pair of shoes or a shop window and searches Google with it, you can now see whether your site showed up. On 24 September 2026, Google announced on the Search Central blog that Search Console is getting a filter that separates image-led searches from everything else.

What changed?

In the Search Console Performance report, the "Web" search type now splits into two: searches made with text, and searches started with an image, photo or screenshot — which Google calls "web multimodal". It covers:

• searches with Google Lens,
• Circle to Search on Android,
• images uploaded directly to Google Search,
• Chrome's right-click "Search this image" option.

Because these searches have no typed query, the report shows no query data. You still see which of your pages appeared, their impressions and clicks, and breakdowns by country, device and date. The rollout is global but gradual, so the option may appear a few days later in some accounts.

Who should care?

Any business where product or venue photos drive buying decisions: restaurants, cafés, boutiques, e-commerce stores, furniture and interior brands. Until now this traffic was hidden inside the general web numbers. Now you can measure how many visitors your images bring in on their own.

Get your images ready for search

Google's image SEO best practices cover the fundamentals. The ones that make the most difference in practice:

• Use original photos. Stock images appear on thousands of sites. Someone searching with a picture is often looking for your actual product or place.
• Write descriptive file names and alt text. "pistachio-baklava.jpg" rather than "IMG_4821.jpg".
• Keep images next to the relevant text. Product name, price and description belong on the same page, close to the image.
• Keep pages fast. Compress large images and use modern formats such as WebP.

If you'd like us to look at how your images perform on Google, start with our free assessment. We build these practices into every web design project from day one.