Search Console's New AI and Multimodal Reports: How to See Your AI Traffic

TL;DR — Search Console now has a Generative AI report (impressions only) and a multimodal search type filter covering Lens, Circle to Search and image uploads; if your store has product photos, these two views are the only way to see how Google's new results treat them.

Until a few months ago, "is any of my traffic coming from AI?" had one honest answer: we can't tell. Google didn't expose the data separately. That changed.

Google introduced Generative AI performance reports on June 3, 2026, and rolled them out to all websites worldwide by August 31, 2026. On September 24, 2026, web multimodal search reporting landed in Search Console as well. So AI visibility and image-driven search are both measurable now.

What each report shows

| Report | What it shows | What it's useful for | | --- | --- | --- | | Generative AI performance | Impressions of your pages in Google's generative AI features (AI Overviews and AI Mode) and in Discover, broken down by page, country, device and date | Finding out whether you appear inside AI answers at all | | Multimodal search type filter | Queries started with an image: Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and Chrome's right-click "Search this image" | Seeing when a shopper pointed a camera at a product and your site showed up | | Multi-select country filter | Select several countries at once and read their combined traffic | Stores selling across borders, without checking countries one by one | | Default performance report | Clicks, impressions, CTR and average position over the last three months | The baseline everything else is compared against |

The multimodal view lives inside the Performance report as a search type called multimodal search, and you can export it with the Export button.

Impressions in AI are not clicks

This is the part people miss. In Google's own announcement of the AI reports, the listed data is impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates — clicks are not part of that list. Everyone wants to express AI traffic as a percentage; the report doesn't give you a click number to divide.

What you can read from it:

• Zero impressions: your pages never surface in AI features. That's a structural problem.
• Many impressions, few clicks: you're visible, but the AI answer doesn't persuade anyone to open your site.
• Track the weekly trend rather than any single day.

Many SEOs have already complained publicly that click data is what they actually want from these AI reports. Until Google ships it, impressions are the signal you have.

The visual side matters most for stores

Most multimodal input arrives from phones: a shopper points a camera at something. If your product images have no descriptive alt text, meaningless filenames or poor quality, you are not realistically in that game — Google may record an impression, but nobody clicks through.

So fix the visual basics first: image alt text and Core Web Vitals for business sites cover exactly those two areas.

Checklist: your first ten minutes

• [ ] Open Performance → Search results and set the range to 3 months
• [ ] Switch the Search type filter to multimodal search and check whether you have impressions
• [ ] Open the Generative AI report and read the weekly impression trend
• [ ] Use the multi-select country filter to group your target markets
• [ ] List the pages with the most AI impressions and check how fresh they are
• [ ] Export both views and compare them against your click data
• [ ] Verify Product schema on product pages (Next.js product schema guide)
• [ ] Flag your top five pages for a rewrite with direct, current answers

FAQ

Q: Why do I see no data at all?

Google states that multimodal metrics appear only if your site receives traffic from these query types — if there's nothing, there's nothing to report. Missing numbers mean no image-driven entries yet, not that AI ignores you. Start with the visual and content side of the page.

Q: How is multimodal search different from Image Search?

Image search no longer means "keyword plus picture". A shopper can point the camera at an object with Lens, circle something on screen with Circle to Search, or upload a photo. Google groups all of these under the multimodal search type so they can be separated from typed queries.

Q: When did this become available?

The AI reports were announced on June 3, 2026 and rolled out to all websites worldwide by August 31, 2026. Multimodal reporting began rolling out globally on September 24, 2026. If part of it is still missing, either the data is filling in or your site has no traffic from those paths yet.

Sources

• Google Search Central — Announcing web multimodal Search performance reporting in Search Console: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/09/web-multimodal-in-sc
• Google Search Central — Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports
• Search Engine Roundtable — Search Console performance report multi-select country filters: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-performance-report-country-filters-42241.html
• Search Console Help — Performance report (Search results): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553