Does your site show up when someone searches with a photo? Search Console now reports it separately

Does your site show up when someone starts a search with a photo? That’s different from appearing in Google Images, and Search Console now lets you separate the two.

Since September 24, the “Web: multimodal” filter shows the performance of web searches started with images. It includes Google Lens, Circle to Search, images uploaded to Google, and “Search this image” in Chrome.

Here’s how I’d review it in an audit:

1. Go to Performance → Search results → Search type → Web: multimodal.
2. Identify which pages get impressions and clicks, and segment them by country or device.
3. On those pages, check whether the images are crawlable and have useful text context.

There are two important limits: “Image” measures results from the Google Images tab, while “Web: multimodal” classifies searches started with an image. Also, the “Queries” dimension isn’t available in the latter filter: Google doesn’t show a specific search phrase for that traffic.

This report opens up a new way to analyze visibility in visual search. On its own, it doesn’t prove which image triggered an appearance, nor does it promise more traffic.

Do you already have data in this filter? Which pages would you review first?