On September 24, Google split the Web line in Search Console into two buckets: text-based and multimodal. The new bucket counts every time one of your pages showed up for a search that started with a photo, a screenshot, Google Lens, or Circle to Search. Google says this traffic was never in your totals before. That makes it the first new measurement lever a local operator has been handed in months, and it landed the same week a Comscore report put AI Overviews in 39.4% of U.S. desktop searches. Here is the week, sorted by what you can act on.
The lead: Google now counts the searches your customers make with a camera
Think about how a homeowner finds a plumber in 2026. The water heater is leaking. They snap the rating plate, run it through Lens, and tap whatever page explains the model and who services it. A boutique customer photographs a jacket in a friend’s closet. A diner points a phone at a storefront sign. None of that ever showed up in Search Console. As of Thursday it does, filed under Search type, then Web, then Multimodal. The catch: there are no query terms. Google says the queries dimension is unavailable because the searcher sent a picture, not words. You get pages, countries, devices, and dates.
The take: this matters more for trades, retail, and food than for anyone else, because those businesses sell things people point cameras at. Equipment, parts, storefronts, menus, finished jobs. It also shows up in the Generative AI features report, so you can see when a camera search put your page inside an AI answer. You still cannot see clicks there. Treat it as a map of which pages Google trusts for visual searches, not as a lead report. That is still more than you had on Wednesday.
Run this check before Monday. It takes 15 minutes:
- Open Search Console, then Performance, then Search results. Click Search type and select Web: multimodal.
- Set the date range to the last 3 months and sort the Pages tab by impressions.
- Write down the top 10 pages. Expect product, service, gallery, and location pages, not the blog.
- For each one, check the photos. Are they your own shots with descriptive file names and alt text, or stock images Google has already seen on thousands of other sites?
- Repeat the filter inside the Generative AI features report and note which of those pages also surface in AI answers.
If the multimodal view is empty, Google says the data only appears for sites that receive this traffic. Empty is its own answer. It means your pages carry no original imagery Google can match to a photo. A contractor with 40 real job photos, named like “rheem-50-gallon-water-heater-install-boise.jpg”, gives Lens something to match. A contractor with three stock photos of a smiling tech does not. One rule of thumb: every service page gets at least one photo you took on a real job this year. It costs nothing but a phone and ten minutes per page.
The search numbers that moved this week
AI Overviews hit 39.4% of desktop searches. Comscore’s Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report, covered by Search Engine Land on September 22, put Google searches with an AI Overview at 39.4% in June, up from 25.8% in July 2025. Bing’s Copilot Search share climbed to 17.3%. Total U.S. desktop search volume still grew 8% over two years, to 77 billion searches in Q2. The detail that should bother a local operator sits lower in the report. YouTube was the most cited domain in retail AI answers at 23%, with Reddit at 12%. The answer box is quoting video and forums, not your homepage.
A field test says forced AI Mode cut outside clicks by 18.8 points. Researchers pushed 1,100 U.S. Chrome users into AI Mode for seven days in March. The share of searches that led to any outside website fell 18.8 percentage points. Satisfaction and trust in Google also dropped, and 11.2 points more participants tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo. Caveat: before the test, AI Mode was only 0.6% of their searches. This measures a future where AI Mode becomes the default, not today. It is still the cleanest evidence yet that the click is the thing at risk. The AU read from August still holds: your Google Business Profile card is your homepage now.
The September 2026 spam update started rolling out Thursday. Google says it applies globally and can take about two weeks. It is the fourth spam update this year, following August’s. If your rankings jump around through early October, do not rewrite pages in a panic. Look for the usual spam-policy trouble first: city-swapped doorway pages, bought reviews, and scaled AI copy pasted across dozens of service-area pages. If you run 30 near-identical “plumber in [town]” pages, this is the update built to catch them.
The tools your competitors adopted this week
Compass put an AI assistant in front of 83,000 agents. Fortune reported on September 23 that the brokerage sold its new AI Assistant with a live demo day watched by more than 10,000 agents. Within weeks of the July debut, about 15,000 agents had run more than 97,000 conversations. The tool connects about 100 real estate apps, drafts reconnect notes to past clients likely to sell, and takes voice notes on the drive between showings. For a solo agent outside a big brokerage, the message is blunt. The assistant is now table stakes at scale. Your edge is the client data and local knowledge that no brokerage tool can pull for you.
Rank Math shipped AI visibility tracking for WordPress sites. On September 23 the WordPress SEO plugin bundled its content, internal linking, and AI Visibility tools into one product called Rank Math AI. The visibility piece now tracks whether your brand shows up in Gemini answers as well as ChatGPT, on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. Plenty of local service sites already run Rank Math, so this is the lowest-friction way to start watching AI answers without buying a separate tool. Track five prompts a customer would actually type, such as “best emergency plumber near [your town]”, and log the results monthly.
Amazon blocked Meta’s new shopping agent. Meta’s Muse agent climbed to the top free app on both U.S. app stores this week, per Bloomberg coverage cited by Fortune. Amazon then blocked Muse from its retail site under its policy against autonomous shopping tools. Two lessons for a local store owner. Agents that shop on a customer’s behalf are arriving now, not in 2028. And the big platforms will decide which agents get in the door. If your product catalog, prices, and hours live only in a PDF menu or a Facebook post, no agent can read them. Put them on a plain HTML page. The case for that is in why cost searches now end in AI answers.
The AU read, and one question for the weekend
Line this week up and one pattern shows. Google is handing out more measurement, meaning multimodal reports and AI feature reports, while answering more searches before a click happens. Vendors like Compass and Rank Math are wrapping AI around the work operators already do. Nobody is going to send you the traffic you used to get for free. What still works is the stuff a model cannot fake: original photos of real jobs, published prices, real reviews, and a business profile kept current every week. The businesses that win the next year will be the ones whose own data is the easiest for Google, Gemini, and ChatGPT to quote accurately.
That turns into a short to-do list for next week. Run the multimodal check above and screenshot the top 10 pages. Swap stock photos on your three highest-traffic service pages for your own. Pick five customer-style prompts and test them in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode, then record which competitor gets named. Leave your pages alone during the spam rollout unless you find a real policy problem. For the longer backstory on how Google started writing business descriptions for you, see the August 14 AU Brief.
The question to sit with this weekend: if a customer photographed your truck, your storefront, or your finished work tomorrow, what page would Google show them? If you do not know the answer, Search Console can now tell you. The AU Brief lands every Friday with the week’s signal and none of the noise. If a colleague forwarded this to you, subscribe below so next week’s lands in your inbox first.
