Customers Are Searching by Camera: Can Google Tell You? (2026)

More of your customers are searching without typing a word. They point a phone camera at a part they need, a plate at a restaurant, a plant that’s dying, or a product on a shelf, and let Google figure out what it is and where to get it. It happens through Google Lens, through Circle to Search on Android, through the "Search this image" option in Chrome. For years, owners have felt this shift without being able to see it. As of this week, you can.

On September 24, 2026, Google announced a new "multimodal" filter in the Search Console Performance report — the same free report you already use to see which Google searches send people to your site. The new filter isolates the traffic that came from image-based searches instead of typed ones, so you can finally separate "someone searched for us with words" from "someone searched for us with a camera."¹

This is a measurement tool, not a product you buy. It won’t magically get you more customers. But it answers a question a lot of Fort Wayne owners have been guessing at, and it points to a few small, free things worth fixing. Below is what the report actually shows, what it stubbornly won’t tell you, how to find it, and — honestly — who should care and who can leave it alone for now. It’s a close cousin of the AI-answers visibility report we walked through earlier, and it fits inside the broader measurement habit we lay out in the Fort Wayne digital marketing playbook.

What Is Google’s New Multimodal Search Report?

Search Console already breaks your Google traffic into types — web, image, video, news. The September update adds a new lens on the "Web" type: a multimodal filter that shows the web-search traffic where someone used an image as part of the search rather than typed text.

In Google’s own words from that announcement, "This update is designed to give you insights into how your content is surfaced when users search using images (such as with a smartphone camera)." The company says the data covers "searches with Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and the Chrome right-click 'Search this image' feature." The announcement came jointly from Harsh Kharbanda, Product Manager Lead for Google Lens, and Moshe Samet, Product Manager Lead for Search Console.

Put plainly: when a homeowner points Lens at a cracked furnace igniter, or a diner circles a dessert in a photo to find where to get it, and Google shows a page from your site — that used to be invisible in your reports, blended into everything else. Now it has its own line you can look at. According to Search Engine Journal’s write-up, the feature also extends to Google’s generative-AI performance report, where it counts impressions rather than clicks.²

What Does the Report Show — and What Doesn’t It?

This is where honesty matters, because the report gives you real data and withholds the one thing you’d probably want most.

What you get is page-level performance for image-driven searches: clicks and impressions, with a country and device breakdown, and the ability to compare that traffic against your text search. What you don’t get is queries. Because these searches mostly use an image rather than words, there’s nothing to report in the Queries tab — as Search Engine Journal notes, "specific text query data isn’t available for this traffic."² So you’ll learn which of your pages get found by camera, but not what the person was looking for when they found them.

The other honest caveat: the data only shows up if your site actually receives image-search traffic. As Search Engine Journal notes, the metrics appear only for sites that get traffic from these searches. Plenty of small local sites — especially service businesses with few product photos — may open the filter and see a flat line. That’s information too, not a bug.

Where Do You Find the Multimodal Filter?

You already have everything you need — a verified Search Console property and a couple of minutes. Inside Search Console, open Performance → Search results, then use the search type control at the top of the report. Alongside the familiar Web, Image, Video, and News options, you’ll now find the multimodal filter that isolates image-based web searches. Google’s Performance report help covers how the search-type filter and the core metrics — clicks, impressions, CTR, average position — work,³ and its dimensions reference explains how to slice the same data by page, country, and device.⁴

A couple of practical notes. The rollout is global but staggered, so if you don’t see the filter yet, it may simply not have reached your property — check back in a week or two before assuming anything. And use the Export button: image-search volume is small for most local businesses, so pulling the numbers into a spreadsheet and watching the trend over months tells you more than a single-day snapshot ever will.

How Should a Local Business Prepare for Visual Search?

Here’s the part where a lot of guides would try to sell you something. We won’t. Almost everything that helps you show up in image-based search is stuff you either already have or can fix for free in an afternoon. The report is the measuring stick; these are the things worth measuring.

• Use real, current, well-lit photos. Google matches a customer’s camera shot to images and pages it understands. Blurry, dated, or stock-looking photos are harder to match. Your actual storefront, actual products, actual work.
• Keep Google Business Profile and site images in sync. The photos on your profile and website are the visual footprint Google draws from. If you renovated, re-shot your menu, or changed packaging, update both.
• Label your images. Descriptive file names and alt text ("gas-furnace-igniter-replacement-fort-wayne.jpg" beats "IMG_4821.jpg") give Google text to connect a photo to what you do.
• Add structured data where it fits. Product, menu, and local-business markup help Google tie an image to a page and a business — the same groundwork that supports answer engine optimization.

If your images are the thing holding you back, that’s a solvable problem — and not necessarily an expensive one. We wrote a full reality check on what AI product photography actually costs for exactly this situation. And because a chunk of visual discovery still happens right on your listing, it’s worth watching how your Google Business Profile photos and posts perform alongside the new Search Console numbers.

One more honest note on scope: this is a measurement report for organic image search. It’s a different thing from the voice-and-camera consumer experience we covered in Google Search Live — that’s how customers ask; this is how you check whether they found you.

Who This Matters For in Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana

Be honest with yourself about your business type, because visual search doesn’t matter equally to everyone in Allen County.

It matters most for businesses with a strong visual product. A Fort Wayne restaurant where a customer photographs a dish or a storefront sign. A retail or home-goods shop where someone snaps a lamp or a chair to find where to buy it locally. Auto and parts businesses, where a driver photographs a worn belt or an odd-looking component to identify and source it. Even contractors and home-services pros whose project photos — a finished deck, a re-tiled bathroom — get surfaced when a nearby homeowner searches for the same look.

If that’s you, the play is simple: make sure your best, most recent work is on your site and your Google Business Profile, labeled clearly, and then check the multimodal report every month or two to see whether camera searches are actually finding you.

And here’s the flip side, because plenty of Northeast Indiana businesses read that list and don’t see themselves in it. If you’re a phone-lead trade — an emergency plumber, an HVAC shop, an electrician — with little product imagery and customers who call rather than browse, glance at the report once, then get back to work. There’s no reason to chase image-search traffic you were never going to get much of. Fixing your reviews and your call handling will pay off faster. This is a report to check, not a project to fund.

Want Help Reading the Numbers?

If you’d rather have someone set up Search Console properly, read the multimodal report against the rest of your traffic, and tell you plainly whether visual search is worth your attention, that’s the kind of thing our SEO and Search Console work is built for — and it pairs naturally with the visual-discovery side of answer engine optimization. We’re based in Auburn and work with businesses across Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana, and we’ll tell you honestly when the answer is "your images are fine, spend your time elsewhere." If you want a second set of eyes on what your reports are showing, tell us what you’re seeing and we’ll start there.