On September 24, at 8:40am Eastern, Google’s Search Central blog quietly turned visual search into a measurable channel. A new multimodal filter in Search Console now splits the old “Web” bucket into “Text-based” and “Multimodal,” exposing traffic from Google Lens, Circle to Search, image uploads, and Chrome’s right-click “Search this image.” The tooltip is dry: “Web-multimodal tracks search results triggered by a query that uses an image, photo, or screenshot. Text-only queries are tracked as Web text-based.”

The interesting part is that this is genuinely new inventory. John Mueller, after an initial hedge (“I thought these were not reported at all before.”), confirmed that “the data wasn’t previously in the counts, the report has new data.” Bluesky user Dave Smart had already flagged impression and click drops starting September 10, which now look like Google reclassifying rather than losing traffic.

The scale is the story. Lens hit nearly 20 billion visual searches a month by October 2024, about 20% of it shopping-related. Q1 2025 added another five billion monthly Lens searches on top of that baseline, with Circle to Search growth near 40% and installs on more than 300 million Android devices by July. Robby Stein, VP of product for Google Search, cited a 65% year-over-year jump in visual searching on a July 23, 2025 podcast. For any small brand selling physical goods, this was already the fastest-growing discovery surface on the open web, and none of it was legible.

There’s a catch. Google’s dimensions help page notes: “Because multimodal searches mostly use images rather than text, specific text query data isn’t available for this traffic. As a result, the queries dimension isn’t available when this search type is selected.” You get pages, devices, countries, dates. No keywords. The Search Analytics API reference, last updated August 11, doesn’t list a multimodal type value yet, so the Export button is the only route out.

The playbook writes itself: rank pages by multimodal impressions, then invest in hero photography, alt text, clean backgrounds, and Product structured data on the underperformers. This lands alongside the debut of dedicated AI search reporting for every site and the move to make AI shopping visibility a standard merchant dashboard. Three separate windows into AI-mediated discovery, opened in three weeks. Google isn’t being subtle about which channel it wants merchants optimizing for next.

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