Search Console Now Shows Google Lens Traffic: What to Do

On 24 September 2026, Google added a new filter to Search Console called "web multimodal". For the first time, you can see how often people found your website by pointing a phone camera at something rather than typing words. If you run a shop, restaurant, hotel or trade business in Cyprus, this deserves ten minutes of your attention.

What Google actually announced

The Performance report in Search Console now has a search type called web multimodal. It groups together the visual ways people search: Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android phones, uploading an image to Google Search, and right-clicking a picture in Chrome and choosing "Search this image". The same filter appears in the Generative AI features report, so you can also see visual searches that led to an AI-generated answer.

The rollout is global and started on the day of the announcement. You will only see the filter if your site already receives traffic from these searches, so an empty report is not a bug. It simply means nobody has reached you through their camera yet.

Why camera searches matter in Cyprus

Think about how people behave here. A tourist photographs a dish in Limassol and wants to know what it is called and where else to find it. A homeowner in Nicosia points a phone at a broken tap fitting to find a replacement. A shopper in Paphos snaps a pair of sandals in a window to compare prices. None of them typed a keyword, yet each one is a customer looking for a business.

Until now that traffic was invisible. It arrived in your analytics mixed in with ordinary Google clicks, so you had no way of knowing whether your product photos, menu pictures or shopfront images were doing any work. The new filter separates it out.

How to check your own numbers

Open Search Console and go to the Performance report for Search results. Above the chart, click "Search type" and choose "Web multimodal". You will see clicks, impressions, average position, and the pages and countries involved. Do the same in the Generative AI features report. If you have never used Search Console, our beginner's guide shows how to set it up in an afternoon.

Look at three things. Which pages appear at all? Which countries do the searches come from? And how does the click-through rate compare with your normal web searches? Then click "Export" and save the data, so you have a baseline to compare against in three months.

What to do if the report is empty

Most Cyprus SMEs will see very little at first, and that is useful information in itself. Google can only match a camera search to your site if it can understand your images. Three practical steps:

• Use your own photos, not stock. A visual search for a specific product or dish matches real, distinctive pictures. A stock photo appears on thousands of sites and points to none of them.
• Put the words next to the picture. Descriptive file names, alt text and a caption with the product name tell Google what the image shows. We covered the basics in Website Photos: The SEO Fix Cyprus Businesses Overlook.
• Let images be indexed. Pictures loaded only by a script, hidden inside a slider or blocked in robots.txt cannot appear in any image-based search. Product schema with an image field helps too.

What to do if you already have traffic

Treat the pages that appear as a hint about what your customers physically see. If a product page gets camera searches from Germany and the UK, tourists are photographing that item. Make sure the page shows the price, opening hours and a map. If the searches come from Cyprus, check that the page works well on a phone, because every one of these visitors is holding one.

Then photograph the rest of your range the same way. If one product attracts visual searches, similar items almost certainly can too, and adding clear photos costs far less than any ad campaign.

Keep it in perspective

This is a reporting change, not a ranking change. Nothing about how Google ranks your pages has altered, and camera searches will stay a small share of traffic for most service businesses. But for anyone who sells physical things, serves food or runs a venue, it is the first honest measurement of a behaviour that has been growing for years. Check the filter this week, export the numbers, and set a reminder to compare them in December.

If you would like help reading the report or fixing image issues on your site, get in touch.