Web (text) and multimodal: what the new Search Console type shows

At midday today I opened the performance report for seo-kreativ.de. The filter at the top no longer said “Search type: Web”. It said “Search type: Web (text)”, next to a blue note telling me I could now see my site’s performance in multimodal web searches.

I switched over. 3,798 clicks turned into 2, 1.54 million impressions turned into 407. Until 10 September the chart was a flat line along the bottom, only after that did a few small spikes appear.

Google announced the filter on 24 September 2026 on the Search Central Blog. According to the post this includes searches with Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search and the Chrome right-click feature “Search this image”. Google says the rollout runs globally from that day. Values appear if a site receives traffic from such searches.

Below are my numbers, the screenshots and what has been clarified since the announcement. The default view now shows only text, and according to Google it does not lose anything that used to be under Web. For me the API only returned text.

In the “Search type” dialog Web is still listed first, below it are now the two options “Text-based” and “Multimodal”, with the second one labelled “New”. Clicking Multimodal moves the selection over from Text-based. Image, Video and News stay as they were.

The info icon next to “Multimodal” explains the search type. In my translation of the German interface: web multimodal covers search results triggered by a query that uses an image, photo or screenshot. Queries that contain only text are counted as web text queries.

The English help page for the performance report lists both definitions side by side. Text covers traditional traffic from text queries typed into the standard Google search bar. Multimodal covers web search results “where an image was used as part of the search”. The products are not listed in the help pages but in the announcement.

The Compare tab matters. There you can put “Web: text” against “Web: multimodal” or one of the two against Image, Video and News, but the list has no option for both Web variants together. So the report does not show you a total of both variants.

When this article was published it was open whether “Web” used to include multimodal searches. John Mueller of Google answered that the same day after checking with the team: “the data wasn’t previously in the counts, the report has new data” (Bluesky, 24 September 2026). Asked in German on 27 September, he wrote that the data is recorded separately, the way Image Search is recorded separately from web search in the reports (Bluesky). So the default view is not missing anything. The multimodal series sits next to it as an addition.

I kept the “3 months” range, so 22 June to 21 September 2026. I read all values from the URL-prefix property https://www.seo-kreativ.de/, whose data was four and a half hours old when I looked.

In the “Days” tab there are only dashes up to and including 9 September. The first value appears on 10 September with 41 impressions and one click, after that the series moves between 20 and 56 impressions a day until 21 September. The second click came on 21 September.

Why the series starts on 10 September in particular, Google does not say. Dave Smart wrote on Bluesky on 24 September that he was seeing corresponding drops in impressions and clicks from 10 September on a few properties. Mueller’s reply to that was the statement that the data is new. He did not confirm the date.

My data cannot settle the question. Under “Web (text)” impressions ranged between 15,573 and 22,823 a day from 1 to 15 September. Multimodal added an average of 34 a day from 10 to 21 September. A shift of that size would disappear in the normal fluctuation. So I still do not compare anything across 10 September.

For a fair size comparison you need the same window. From 10 to 21 September text brought 410 clicks and 201,457 impressions. Multimodal makes up around 0.2% of the impressions. For a website about SEO that does not surprise me. Anyone searching for a pair of shoes by photo is unlikely to land on my site.

The average position of 2.5 looks better than the 10.6 for text. I did not find an explanation in the help pages of what position measures for a search with an image. So I do not read any advantage into it.

The device split is the clearest difference. Of 407 multimodal impressions 362 came from phones, 35 from desktop and 10 from tablets, while for text in the same window 22% of impressions came from phones and 77% from desktop.

Among the pages the English version of my TL;DR page leads with 185 impressions, 45% of the total. Behind it come the English posts on AI Mode and AI Overviews with 55 and on Preferred Sources with 40 impressions. The two clicks went to exactly these two posts. Only one of the top ten pages is German.

The country split fits. India leads with 98 impressions, Germany is second with 47, then the United Kingdom with 43 and the USA with 36. With 407 impressions in total these are small numbers. I would not turn them into a pattern yet.

One small thing caught my eye while scrolling. Six rows are jump links of the same English post about goto links, such as #kosten or #statement, each with 2 impressions. Search Console lists them as separate URLs in this table.

Click on “Queries” and you get a single sentence. In my translation of the German interface: no query data for multimodal web search.

Google explains this in the help page on dimensions and data groupings. Because multimodal searches mostly use images rather than text, there is no specific query data for this traffic. The dimension is therefore not available once this search type is selected.

In practice this means the report cannot tell you what people searched for. It can tell you which page was shown, on which device and in which country. In my view that is enough for a first look. For optimisation it is thin.

According to Google the search type is also available in the report on generative AI features in Search Console. There seo-kreativ.de shows 12 multimodal impressions for the same period, four of them on the English TL;DR page.

My own analyses run through the Search Analytics API, not through the interface. So that was the first question I asked myself: what does the API return under web now?

The API documentation (last updated 11 August 2026) describes web as the combined “All” tab of Google Search, excluding Discover and Google News. It does not list a separate value for multimodal. Google’s announcement does not mention the API either. It names export as the way to get the data.

I pulled the device split for the same period through the API and compared it with the interface. The result:

All six values are identical. If the 362 mobile multimodal impressions were included in the API, mobile would read 287,374. They are not.

According to Mueller, nothing that used to be under Web is missing from the API. The new multimodal series does not come through it either, though. With 407 impressions this gap does not matter to me. For a shop with many product images this can look different, because anyone pulling Search Console data into a dashboard via the API currently sees text according to my comparison and may take it for Web. Whether Google will update the API I do not know.

1. Set up the comparison. Open the performance report, click the search type chip, go to the “Compare” tab, choose “Web: text” on the left and “Web: multimodal” on the right. That shows both series in one chart.
2. Read the pages. The “Pages” tab puts both columns side by side. Look for pages that show up under multimodal and barely under text. Look at those first.
3. Check devices. If your split looks like mine, look at these pages on a phone. For me 362 of 407 multimodal impressions came from there.
4. Mark the start. Read the first day of your series in the “Days” tab and add a custom annotation in Search Console there. For me it is 10 September 2026.
5. Label your exports. Note with every export which search type was active. Otherwise in three months you compare two different things.
6. Cross-check the API. Pull the device totals through the API once and compare them with “Web (text)”. If they match, multimodal is missing from your API data.

And the images themselves? Google does not connect its image documentation to the new search type so far. In my view the guide to images in Google Search is still the obvious place to start. Among other things it says that Google picks up images through the HTML element <img> and does not index CSS background images. Google calls alt text the most important attribute for image metadata. And images should sit near relevant text.

If your numbers swing a lot, first have a look at how to narrow down a drop in impressions. A changed default view can show up there as a measurement effect.

The 407 impressions are a footnote for me. For a website with lots of product or subject images this can look very different.

When this article was published I considered the new default view the more important consequence. Google has cleared that up. Multimodal searches were not previously in the counts under “Web”, they are added as a new series.

That leaves the API. Anyone working with it gets text for the same call on my property and does not see the new series, although the documentation still talks about the combined tab. That does not stand out unless you count.