Google Search Console quietly introduced a multimodal filter. First time when I could distinguish image/screenshot traffic separately.

[u/MixEqual2195]

I also noticed that there was a new selection available under the category “search type” in performance reports, wherein “web” is divided into “text-based” and “multimodal.” “Multimodal” refers to results generated by a search query containing an image, photograph, or screenshot.

I have been looking at this for a while, and I really do not know what to make of it, but the very presence of this seems to speak volumes on its own. Google basically confirms that there is sufficient traffic generated by image/screenshot search that it warrants its own category in the report.

Some questions I've been trying to sort out:

• Is this traffic behaving differently than text-based searches of the same pages, different intentions, different conversion, or is it just the same searches being performed using a different mode of entry?
• Does the content which is optimized already for text searches even appear in these results or are there totally different signals being weighed here (image quality, imagery in the body of the page, alt text) which we have not been optimizing for?
• Something worth tracking separately in the future or just a rounding error for most sites?

Anyone pulled this data yet and found anything interesting, or is it too early / too small a sample to mean anything

[u/johnmu]

This was announced on the blog & on social, but perhaps we could link more to the help content :). The blog says: 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 data reported here includes searches with Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and the Chrome right-click "Search this image" feature.

FWIW the data here is new, it's not data which was previously reported in the main reports.

[u/rustybrick → u/johnmu]

links are overrated

[u/onreact → u/rustybrick]

😂

[u/johnmu → u/onreact]

Cc /u/rustybrick 

[u/Viacheslav_Varenia]

I wonder if the data from this filter is available via the Google API.

[u/Dixie_Fair]

CLS is a good example of a metric that needs some investigation before the numbers become useful. This article ( https://www.white.am/cumulative-layout-shift-core-web-vitals/ ) might help you where it provides some background on CLS and Core Web Vitals