Search Console Now Shows Visual Search Traffic
Search Console visual search reporting now separates image-led traffic. Use the new filter to audit pages, photos, local SEO signals, and priority pages.
Google just made visual search easier to measure, and that changes how marketers should audit pages with strong photo, product, location, or service context.
On September 24, Google Search Central announced a new Search Console reporting filter for web multimodal search. The report covers searches where someone used an image as part of the search, including Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome’s “Search this image” feature.
The practical takeaway is simple: if your business depends on products, places, facilities, equipment, before-and-after work, menus, inventory, or local trust signals, visual search is no longer invisible in reporting. You may not get query data, but you can now see which pages are getting found when the search starts with a camera or screenshot.
What The New Filter Actually Shows
The new filter sits inside Search Console’s Performance reporting. Google says the data will appear for sites receiving traffic from these image-led searches, and site owners can export it for analysis alongside other search data.
That matters because visual search has always been harder to diagnose than typed search. A person might photograph a product, scan a storefront, circle an item on their phone, or use a screenshot as the starting point. In the old reporting view, marketers had limited visibility into whether those behaviors were reaching the site at all.
The new report does not solve everything. Google’s Search Console documentation notes that specific text query data is not available for image-based search traffic because these searches mostly use images instead of typed words. That means this is a page-level clue, not a full keyword report.
Still, a page-level clue is useful. If a product category, location page, service gallery, case study, or ecommerce collection starts receiving multimodal clicks or impressions, that page deserves a closer look.
Why This Matters For Local And Ecommerce SEO
Visual search is not only an ecommerce feature. It matters for any business where a buyer can recognize the need through something they see.
A homeowner can photograph roofing material. A patient can search from a clinic screenshot. A shopper can use an image of a helmet, shoe, fixture, restaurant dish, venue, sign, or product label. A B2B buyer can search from a part, tool, component, or spec sheet image.
That shifts the SEO audit from “does the page have keywords?” to “does the page clearly connect the image, object, location, service, and business?”
For ecommerce brands, this means product images, filenames, alt text, product schema, reviews, availability, and category structure deserve more attention. For local businesses, it means location photos, service photos, staff photos, logo consistency, map listings, review language, and page content all have to support the same story.
Local SEO and SEO strategy now overlap inside the visual asset itself. The image is not decoration. It becomes part of how Google understands what the business offers, where it operates, and whether the page deserves to surface when a search begins with an image instead of a phrase.
What To Audit This Week
Start in Search Console and check whether the multimodal filter is available for your property. If it is, export the data and compare visual-search pages against standard text-search pages. Look for pages that appear in one report but not the other.
Then audit the pages that show multimodal activity:
- Are the images original, clear, and tied to the business?
- Do filenames and alt text describe the actual product, service, place, or object?
- Does the page include enough surrounding context for Google to understand what the image represents?
- Is structured data present where it fits, especially Product, LocalBusiness, Organization, Review, or FAQ markup?
- Do calls to action match the likely intent of someone searching from a phone camera or screenshot?
Do not turn this into busywork across every image on the site. Start with revenue pages: service pages, product pages, location pages, galleries, collections, and pages that already earn impressions.
Visual search reporting is still imperfect. No query data means marketers have to infer intent from pages, devices, countries, and conversion paths. But that is better than pretending the behavior does not exist.
The Monday-morning move is to treat image-led search as a discovery path, not an SEO novelty. If your best pages rely on visuals, make sure those visuals are clean, descriptive, connected to the page, and backed by enough proof for a searcher to take the next step.