Track Lens and Circle to Search Traffic in Search Console

People increasingly search with a camera instead of a keyboard: they point their phone at a product, a plant or a shop sign and ask Google what it is. Until recently, site owners could not see that traffic separately. On 24 September 2026, Google announced multimodal search reporting in Search Console, which shows how your pages perform when people search with images. It sits in the normal performance reports and is easy to miss.

What counts as multimodal search

Google’s announcement lists exactly what the new data includes:

• searches with Google Lens
• Circle to Search on Android
• image uploads to Google Search
• the “Search this image” option when you right-click an image in Chrome

In all of these, the starting point is a picture rather than typed words. The data appears in the performance report for Search results and also in the report for Generative AI features, so you can see image-led searches that led to AI answers too.

How to find the data

Google added a new multimodal option to the search type filter in the performance reports. The steps:

1. Open Search Console and choose your property.
2. Go to Performance → Search results.
3. Click the Search type filter at the top (it shows “Web” by default).
4. Choose the multimodal search type.
5. Look at the Pages tab to see which URLs get this traffic.

Google’s Performance report help page explains how the search type filter works. You can also use Export to download the data and compare it with other reports in a spreadsheet.

If the filter shows nothing, that is normal for many sites. Google says you will see these metrics only if your site receives traffic from these searches. The rollout started globally on 24 September 2026.

How to read what you find

The multimodal numbers are most useful when you compare them with other search types, not on their own. Some questions to ask:

• Which pages appear? Product pages, recipe pages and how-to pages with clear photos are the usual candidates. If a page you expected is missing, look at its images.
• How does it compare with the Image search type? Image search is people typing words and browsing pictures. Multimodal is people starting with a picture. A page strong in one and weak in the other is worth a closer look.
• Is click-through low? If a page gets many impressions but few clicks, the page title or the image Google shows may not match what people were looking for.
• Which countries and devices? Circle to Search is an Android feature, so expect mostly mobile traffic.

Be careful with small numbers. A handful of impressions can swing week to week for no meaningful reason. Look at trends over at least a month before changing anything, and treat this report as one signal among several.

Turn the data into image fixes

Google’s announcement says the data can help you “optimize your visual content”. There is no special trick for multimodal search; the work is Google’s normal image advice. The image SEO best practices are the place to start, and these are the points that matter most for a typical WordPress site:

1. Use real, sharp photos of the actual thing. A camera search matches what it sees. Your own clear photo of the product is far more useful than a generic stock image.
2. Put images near the text that describes them. Google uses the surrounding text, the page title and captions to understand an image.
3. Write descriptive alt text. Describe what is in the picture in plain words, such as “red ceramic coffee mug with a wooden handle”, not a list of keywords.
4. Use descriptive file names such as red-ceramic-mug.jpg rather than IMG_4821.jpg.
5. Use standard HTML images. Google says it finds images in the src attribute of img elements. Images loaded only as CSS backgrounds are not indexed in the same way.
6. Keep images fast. Use modern formats and sensible sizes. WordPress now handles AVIF, as covered in the earlier post on AVIF and HEIC support in core.
7. Let Google crawl your images. Check that robots.txt doesn’t block your uploads folder.

For online shops, product data matters as much as the photo. Google’s guide to generative AI search recommends keeping Merchant Center product information up to date, because AI answers and visual searches can show products directly. If you use AI-generated product images, check the rules first: the earlier post on AI-generated images in Merchant Center explains the IPTC tag requirement.

Where this fits with AI search

Multimodal data also appears in the Generative AI features report, which matters because many camera searches now lead to an AI answer. If a page gets image-led traffic in that report, the same image and content basics apply. The earlier post on the Search Console generative AI report explains what that report can and cannot tell you.

The practical takeaway is simple. Check the multimodal filter once a month. If your pages appear, find the ones with weak click-through and improve their photos and descriptions. If they don’t appear and your business sells physical things, your images are the first place to look.

Keep a simple log as you go: note the date you changed the photos or alt text on a page. Four weeks later, use the date filter in the Performance report to compare the four weeks before and after the change. That tells you whether the work made a difference, instead of guessing.