Google Lens Search: Is Your Business Website Ready?

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If you have opened Google Search Console since 24 September, there is a new word in the search-type menu: multimodal. Most business owners will never click it, which is a pity, because it is the first time Google has shown you how often people find your business by pointing a camera at something instead of typing.

That is a different kind of search. It needs a different kind of website.

What Google actually added on 24 September

The announcement came on the Google Search Central blog, written jointly by the product leads for Google Lens and Search Console. Search Console now reports what Google calls web multimodal search: searches where the query is an image, a photo or a screenshot rather than a string of words. Four routes feed into it. Lens itself, Circle to Search on Android phones, image uploads straight into Google Search, and the "Search this image" option when you right-click a picture in Chrome.

You find it in the Performance report. Change the search type filter from the default to multimodal and you see clicks, impressions and pages for that traffic alone. The same filter appears in the newer report for Google's generative AI features. Google says it is rolling out globally, and that the numbers only appear if your site is actually receiving traffic from these searches.

One detail matters more than the rest. According to Google's own Search Console Help documentation, because these searches mostly use images rather than text, specific query data is not available for them, and the queries dimension disappears when you select multimodal. You can see that people arrived. What they photographed stays hidden.

I will come back to why that gap is important. First, the scale.

The search your customer never types

Google has been unusually open about how big camera search has become. In October 2024 the Google blog put Lens at nearly 20 billion visual searches every month, and said roughly one in five of those were shopping related. The same post described Lens queries as one of the fastest growing query types on Search, with the heaviest use among 18 to 24 year olds. By its I/O conference in May 2025, Google was saying more than 1.5 billion people use Lens each month to search what they see.

Treat those as Google's own figures about Google's own product. They are global, they are not broken down by country, and no company undersells its growth story. Even so, divide them by a hundred and the habit is still mainstream.

Think about how a customer actually behaves now. They see a lamp in a friend's kitchen and photograph it. A jacket in somebody's Instagram story gets screenshotted. On a street they are visiting, the phone gets pointed at a shopfront. Someone else photographs a broken part off the boiler and asks Google what it is. None of those people typed your business name. Not one of them typed anything at all.

That last point is what makes this awkward for small businesses. Every piece of search advice most owners have ever been given is about words: keywords, page titles, descriptions, what customers type. Camera search skips the typing. The question Google is answering is no longer "which page mentions these words" but "which page shows this thing, and can I be confident about it".

How Google decides your photo is the answer

Google does not publish a separate rulebook for Lens. What it does publish is its image best practices guide for Search, last updated in March 2026, and the principles in it are the ones that let Google understand a picture on your page well enough to match it.

The guide is plain about it. Google extracts information about an image from the content of the page around it, including captions and image titles. Images should sit near relevant text, on pages that are actually about the thing in the picture. The filename gives "very light clues" about the subject, with the example that my-new-black-kitten.jpg beats IMG00023.JPG. Descriptive alt text is expected. Sharp, high-quality photos, Google notes, appeal to users more than blurry ones. And it says structured data lets Google show your images with richer information attached, such as a product badge.

Put that in shop terms. A camera search returns pages where Google can say, with some confidence, "this is that object, and here is somebody selling it or explaining it". Confidence comes from three things working together:

A real photo of the real item. If your product page uses the same manufacturer image as forty other retailers, you are one of forty identical candidates. A photo you took yourself is the only version of that image on the web.
Words that say what it is. A product name, a model, a colour, a material, near the picture and in the alt text. Without them, Google has a picture and a guess.
A page about one thing. A single product page tells Google what the image is for. A gallery page with forty untitled photos tells it almost nothing.

That third point is where most small business sites fall down, and it is a technical decision as much as a content one. More on that below. For the wider picture of how image weight and image markup affect both speed and rankings, our guide to WordPress image SEO and page speed covers the mechanics in detail.

Camera search matches the object in the photo to a page Google understands.

Where small shops lose the camera search

Consider a scenario that plays out in some form every weekend. It is illustrative, not one shop's story.

A bridal boutique in Carlow stocks a particular designer's dress. Scrolling through a friend's wedding photos, a bride-to-be spots that dress, screenshots it, and runs it through Lens. Google comes back with matches: the designer's own site, two large online retailers in the UK, a resale listing. The boutique that actually has the dress on a rail forty minutes from her house does not appear.

Why not? Because on the boutique's website, that dress lives in a gallery page called "Collections", as image fourteen of thirty, filename DSC_4471.jpg, no alt text, no product name, no description. The owner knows exactly which dress it is. Google has no way to.

The bride books appointments in Dublin instead. Nobody at the boutique ever finds out the search happened. That is the part that should bother you. A lost camera search does not look like a lost sale. It looks like nothing at all.

I made a version of this mistake myself years ago, telling a customer that alt text was an accessibility box to tick and not worth an afternoon. Wrong about accessibility then, and the advice would be doubly wrong now. Alt text is the label on the photo, and without it Google is reading a picture with no caption.

What camera search cannot see, and what you cannot see of it

I promised I would come back to the gap in the data. There are three honest limits worth knowing before you spend a weekend renaming photos.

You will not see the photo. Search Console shows multimodal clicks and impressions by page, not by query. If a product page picks up camera traffic, you know that page is working. You will not know whether people photographed your product, a competitor's version, or something vaguely similar. Draw conclusions at page level and no further.

Small sites may see nothing for a while. Google says the data appears only if your site is getting this traffic. A blank multimodal view is not a fault in your setup. It may just mean you are not yet being matched, which is the point of doing the work.

Shopping results in Europe are shifting under your feet. Search Engine Roundtable reported in September that Google has removed free product listings and popular product carousels from search across the European Economic Area as part of its Digital Markets Act changes, with Google's Ads Liaison confirming the removal. Google has also published a new regional differences page in its Search documentation. How much of that reaches Lens results in Ireland, Google has not spelled out, and I would not guess. What it does mean is that your own product page carries more weight than a feed you have handed to somebody else.

And one concession, because it is true.

If you sell a mass-produced item that thousands of retailers also stock, a phone charger, a branded kettle, a popular toy, the large retailers with professional product feeds, dedicated merchandising teams and Google Merchant Center set up properly will win most camera searches for it. That is a scale game, and big e-commerce operations genuinely suit it better. Do not fight it there. Fight it on what is yours: the handmade piece, the dish only your kitchen makes, the shopfront, the curated stock with your own photos and your own words beside it. Camera search rewards being the only good match, and a small business is far more often the only good match than it thinks.

Getting your photos ready for camera search in four steps

This is the part you can act on this month. It needs no developer and no budget, only an afternoon per batch of products.

Audit your top pages. Open Search Console, set the search type to multimodal, and note which pages appear, if any. Then list the ten products or services you would most like a stranger to find from a photo.
Replace borrowed images. Swap supplier and stock photos on those ten pages for photos you took yourself, in good light, of the actual item. Keep the supplier image as a second shot if it helps.
Rename and describe before you upload. Give each file a short descriptive name (ivory-lace-a-line-wedding-dress.jpg, not DSC_4471.jpg), write alt text that says what the item is, and put the product name and two or three plain-English details in the text beside it.
Give each item its own page and verify the markup. Move hero products out of galleries onto their own pages. If you sell online, make sure each product page carries product structured data, which WooCommerce adds by default, and verify it with Google's Rich Results Test before you deploy the change.

Then wait. Recrawling takes time, and Google has said elsewhere that image thumbnails are slow to update in results. Check the multimodal view again in four to six weeks, not four days.

Where the platform under your photos matters

Everything in that checklist is content work. But two parts of it depend on the platform under the site, and this is where hosting decisions show up in places owners do not expect.

The first is control. You can only rename files, write alt text, build individual product pages and add structured data if your platform lets you touch those things. Some closed site builders limit how much of that you can change, and many agency-built sites leave the owner unable to edit image details without a paid change request. A camera search strategy built on "email the designer and wait a week" will not survive contact with a busy season.

The second is speed. Better photos are heavier photos. Google's own guide notes that images are often the largest contributor to page size, which slows pages down. A customer who taps through from a Lens result on a weak mobile signal will give a slow product page a few seconds before going back to the next match.

So what should a platform for this actually do? Three things: it gives you full access to every image setting and page, it handles the caching and server work so heavier images still load quickly, and it does not charge you extra for either. Web60 is built to that standard.

Every site is full WordPress, so you control filenames, alt text, product pages and markup yourself from the first day, with no change requests and no hourly rates. The pages are served from Irish infrastructure on an optimised stack, with Nginx, FastCGI page caching and Redis object caching doing the heavy lifting, which in practice means the customer who just photographed your product sees your page load before their patience runs out.

All of it sits inside Web60's €60/year all-inclusive managed WordPress platform, including SSL, nightly backups and security. If you are starting from scratch, the AI builder will have a professional WordPress site in place in about a minute, and then the photos and the words are yours to get right.

For a fuller look at how the server side of speed works, from caching layers to Core Web Vitals, see our complete WordPress performance guide.

One item, one page, one clearly described photo.

The practical upshot

For twenty years, being found on Google meant being found for words. That is still most of it. But a growing share of your future customers will meet you through a photo they took of something they wanted, and the website that wins that moment is the one where Google can tell, from the page itself, exactly what is in the picture.

You do not need to rebuild anything to start. Pick the ten products or services that matter most, give each a real photo, a real name and a page of its own, and check the new multimodal filter in a month. If those pages start appearing, you will know the camera has found you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is multimodal search in Google Search Console?

It is a new search type filter in the Performance report, added on 24 September 2026. It shows clicks and impressions from searches where the query was an image rather than typed text, including Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search and the "Search this image" option in Chrome. Google does not show query data for this traffic, only the pages people landed on.

How do I get my products to show up in Google Lens?

There is no switch to turn on. Google matches photos to pages it understands, so use your own photos of the actual item, give image files descriptive names, write alt text that says what the item is, put the product name and details near the image, and give each important product its own page. If you sell online, product structured data helps Google connect the image to a price and availability.

Why does my multimodal report in Search Console show no data?

Google says the data only appears if your site is receiving traffic from these searches. A blank report usually means your pages are not yet being matched to camera searches, not that something is broken. It can also take several weeks for changes to your images to be recrawled and reflected in results.

Does Google Lens matter for a service business with no products?

Less than for a shop, but not zero. People photograph shopfronts, signs, menus, dishes, vans and broken parts and ask Google what they are looking at. If you are a café, a trade or a local service, clear photos of your premises, your work and your signage, labelled properly on relevant pages, give Google something to match.

Is alt text still important for SEO in 2026?

Yes. Google's image best practices guide still asks for descriptive alt text, and it remains essential for people using screen readers. With camera search growing, it is one of the few ways you can tell Google in plain words what a photo on your site shows.

Google Lens Search: What the New Multimodal Filter Means for Your Business Website