Red Isle WebSay someone is walking the Charlottetown waterfront on a Saturday, and a storefront catches their eye, with a hand-painted sign over the door and a window full of pottery. They hold up the phone, point the camera at the window and tap, and Google tells them what the shop is and where it is. Nobody typed your name. The whole search was a picture of your front window.
Yes, people can find a business that way, and since September 24, 2026 Google has shown website owners how often it happens. Search Console, the free tool Google gives every site owner, now reports photo-based searches as their own line, separate from the ordinary typed kind. Google hasn't said what makes a photo match a business, so for now the report is a way to count it.
What counts as a photo search?
Google's announcement names four routes: Google Lens, Circle to Search on Android, uploading a photo straight into Google Search, and right-clicking an image in Chrome to search it. Lens is the camera mode inside the Google app, and Circle to Search lets someone on an Android phone draw a ring around anything on their screen. In every case the person used a picture as part of the search, and often no words at all.
What did Google change on September 24?
The Performance report in Search Console used to have a single Web option for ordinary search results, and it now has two, Web: text-based and Web: multimodal, where multimodal means a search that used an image as part of it. Choose the multimodal one and you see clicks and impressions by page, country and device. The search words are missing, because Google says photo searches mostly don't have any, and the photo itself is not shown either.
Google's John Mueller said this traffic was not counted in the Web numbers before, so the new line is new data and not your old data sorted into a new bucket. Google is rolling the option out worldwide, and not every site had it on the first day.
What does this mean for a PEI business?
A photo of your storefront or your product can now be how a customer reaches you, and Search Console is the first place that traffic gets a line of its own. The early analysis I read expects image-heavy sites, such as retail, travel, food and product catalogues, to feel it first, which covers a lot of Island businesses. I couldn't find anything from Google on what helps a photo match a business. Clear, current pictures are sensible groundwork, with no proof behind them yet.
I wrote earlier about why your website should show photos of the jobs you've done, and the same reasoning carries over, since the photo now helps people find your page too.
"Is this even happening on PEI yet?"
Nobody has published Island numbers, and I won't make one up. Google switched the filter on worldwide, which leaves your own report as the only count that matters for your business. Open Search Console, choose Performance, and set the search type to Web: multimodal. If the option isn't there yet, check back later. If it is there and the report is empty, your site isn't being found that way so far.
The good news
Getting ready for photo searches is closer to a tidy-up than a project, since you likely have the photos already, sitting in the camera roll on your phone. The front of your building, your sign, your best-selling products, and anything with writing on it, from a menu board to a hand-lettered price list, are the ones to start with. Sharp, recent shots of those, put on your website and on your Google listing, are most of the work.
That's the kind of groundwork I build into the sites I make here at Red Isle Web, for Island businesses, at a one-time price with no monthly fee, with current photos on the page and Search Console connected from the start. Have a look at my work, or send me a note and I will look through the photos on your website and your Google listing.