Camera searches now show in Search Console: what sellers can check

A shopper in Seoul points her phone at a jar on a friend's shelf and taps search. No words are typed, in any language. Until last week you had no way to see whether that search ever led to your site. Since 24 September 2026 Search Console counts it.

What Google added on 24 September

Search Console can now tell you how often your pages were shown when someone searched with an image instead of words. Google announced it on the Search Central blog on 24 September 2026, in a post signed by product leads from Google Lens and Search Console.

The post lists four ways of searching that are counted together as "web multimodal search":

Google Lens
Circle to Search on Android
Images uploaded to Google Search
The right-click "Search this image" option in Chrome

You find the data through a new search type filter in the Performance report. The Search Console help page now lists five search types: Web (text-based), Web (multimodal), Image, Video and News. The same data also appears in the Generative AI features report. Google says the rollout started worldwide that day, and that the numbers appear only if your site receives traffic from these searches.

Where to look: Search Console, Performance, Search results, then change the search type filter to Web (multimodal). Use Export to take the numbers into a spreadsheet.

Why this matters more when you sell across borders

A camera search has no language. That is the part that matters for a seller whose customers type in Korean, German or Thai.

With typed search, a shopper abroad finds you only if your page matches the words she uses, in her language. With a camera search she starts from the product itself: the jar, the label, the shoe. Google matches the picture first. Your page then has to answer in a language she can read.

The volume is not small. In October 2024 a Google vice president of product management wrote that Lens is used for nearly 20 billion visual searches every month, and that 20 percent of all Lens searches are shopping-related. Those are Google's own figures and they are two years old; Google has not broken them down by country.

People also add words to a picture. Someone photographs a product and types a few words after it, the kind of search you would otherwise see as "where to buy this in Korea" or "same lamp cheaper". For a small brand with no name recognition abroad, being matched on the picture is a way in that does not depend on anyone knowing what you are called.

What the new numbers do not tell you

Treat the first weeks of data as a count, not as a diagnosis.

It may be empty. Google says you will see the metrics only if your site gets traffic from these searches. A blank report is information too.
The Generative AI report is limited. Google's help page describes it as showing impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, device and date. That report reached all sites worldwide on 31 August 2026, according to Search Engine Journal.
There is no long history. The data starts with the rollout, so you cannot compare with last year's holiday season.
It does not show the picture. You see which pages were shown, not which photograph the shopper took.

What you can do is filter by country. If a page is being shown to camera searchers in a country where you have no page in the local language, that is a specific, cheap thing to fix.

Getting product images ready

Nothing in Google's announcement changes its image guidelines, so the existing ones are the checklist. They were last updated on 2 March 2026.

Google's guidance	What to check on a cross-border shop
Use img elements; Google does not index CSS background images	Sliders and hero banners built with background images hide your best product photos
Write descriptive alt text without stuffing keywords	Translate the alt text on each language version, not only the visible copy
Use descriptive file names; consider translating them for localised pages	IMG_0023.jpg on every language version tells Google nothing
Place images near relevant text on a relevant page	The product name, size and price should sit next to the photo, in the page's language
Product markup: image is required; several high-resolution images in 16x9, 4x3 and 1x1, at least 50,000 pixels each	Add a square, a 4x3 and a wide crop of the main product photo
Image sitemaps can include image URLs on another domain	If your images sit on a CDN, list them in the sitemap

Two more points are our own view, not Google's. First, photograph the product the way a stranger will see it: the front of the pack, straight on, in good light, as well as the styled shot. A camera search starts from the real object. Second, use the same main photo on every language version of a product page and on any marketplace listing you control, so that whichever page Google matches, it is clearly the same product.

A 20-minute check this week

You do not need a project for this. Open Search Console, switch the Performance report to Web (multimodal), set the date range to the last seven days and look at three things: which pages appear, from which countries, and whether those pages exist in that country's language. Then open your best-selling product page, view the source, and see whether the main photo is an img element with alt text and a file name a person could read.

If you would like a second pair of eyes on how your site appears on Google, AI search and Naver, we do a free visibility check and send it as a two-page PDF.

We cannot tell you how much traffic camera search will bring you. Nobody outside Google can yet. What changed last week is that you can now look.

General information, not legal or tax advice. Check with a professional before acting on it.