Google published two big documentation items for search teams this year. In June: performance reports for generative AI features arrived in Search Console. In September: a documented notion of multimodal Search — images, lenses, voice, the things AI Mode actually reads — arrived in the docs.
Why the June report matters to every site
- You can now measure how much of your traffic arrives through generated answers instead of the classic ten blue links.
- Reports ship separately from web search data, so the numbers finally tell the difference.
- One more reason to keep your titles, dates and structured data accurate: AI search quoting a page only works if it can trust the text it quotes.
What September's multimodal changes mean
The Search Console docs and the September update explicitly show how the index now reads a page through several senses: text, image, query-by-photo. If your product photos or diagrams are unlabelled, remote-only or behind script, you did not just lose a design prize. You lost the queries that now arrive that way.
Being indexed used to mean 'reached a crawler'. This year it means more than being read.
Do one thing first: open the new reports in Search Console, compare next to web-search impressions, and note the split. Everything else is a decision that gets easier once you have that number.