Search Console Multimodal Filter: What Google Lens Traffic Shows and What It Hides

September 25, 2026. Google added a new search type to Search Console on Thursday. The Search Central announcement, signed by Harsh Kharbanda, product manager lead for Google Lens, and Moshe Samet, product manager lead for Search Console, says the Performance report and the Generative AI features report now carry a multimodal filter for searches that start with an image rather than typed words. For a local business, an e-commerce brand or an agency that reports search performance to clients, it is the first time Google has said how often a camera, not a keyboard, put a site in front of someone.

What the new filter covers

1. Four entry points. The data includes searches made with Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome's right-click "Search this image" feature.
2. Web is now two things. Opening the Search type filter splits the old Web option into Text-based and Multimodal. The multimodal option carries a New badge in the property we checked.
3. Two reports, one filter. It appears in the report for performance on Search results and in the report for Generative AI features, and the Export button works on both.
4. Global rollout from September 24. Google says metrics appear only if a site is already receiving traffic from these searches.
5. Still no queries. Search Engine Land notes that the generative AI report still shows no click or query data. In our property the multimodal Queries tab reads "No query data for multimodal web search". You get pages, countries and devices, not what the person pointed the camera at.

What we saw on our own property

We opened the filter on imisofts.com on the morning of September 25. Over the three month window the multimodal view shows 4 impressions, 0 clicks and an average position of 2, with every impression dated after September 15. Three pages account for all of it: our Australia cold email law guide with 2, and our UK cold calling law guide and Denmark cold email law guide with 1 each. Against 117,000 text-based impressions in the same window, camera search is a rounding error for a B2B services site, which is exactly the point of the filter: it tells you whether the channel exists for you at all before you spend anything on it.

What it means for operators

The businesses this matters for are the ones whose customers hold a phone up to something: a restaurant menu, a product on a shelf, a plant, a broken part, a competitor's storefront. For those sites the multimodal column is a new demand signal, and it is the only place Google reports it. The practical moves are the ones image search always rewarded and most sites still skip: original photographs rather than stock, descriptive alt text and file names, product structured data with image fields, and a page for each product or service that the image can land on. If the column reads zero after a month, that is useful too, because it is a channel you can stop worrying about. For agencies, the more important change is where the filter lives. It sits inside the same Generative AI features report that our AEO pricing analysis called the first measurable deliverable for AI search work, so a client report on AI search optimization can now show AI Overview impressions and camera-search impressions side by side, from Google's own data rather than a third-party estimate.