Can a Photo Lead Someone to Your Insurance Agency's Website?

The search traffic Search Console just started showing you

Open Search Console right now, click into the Performance report, and look at the Search type filter. For twenty years that filter has offered the same handful of choices: Web, Image, Video, News, and a couple of Google-surface specific ones like Discover. As of September 24, 2026, Web isn't one bucket anymore. Google's Search Central Blog announced that day that the Performance report now separates Web results into "Web (text)" and "Web (multimodal)," with the multimodal group counting any search where an image was part of the query rather than only typed words.¹

That's a real, immediate change to a report agency owners already have open. It isn't a roadmap item or a beta waitlist. If your site has had any traffic at all since the rollout, there is a number sitting in your own Search Console property right now that didn't exist as a visible figure three weeks ago.

Here's why that matters more for an insurance agency than it sounds like it should. Your site exists mostly to answer questions a prospect or an existing client has about a document they're holding: a card, a bill, a letter from a carrier, a formulary page, a denial notice. Those are exactly the objects people now point a phone camera at instead of typing a description of them. A client who gets a confusing letter about their 2027 plan doesn't always type "what does my Medicare Advantage non-renewal letter mean." Increasingly, they take a photo of the letter and search from there.

Picture the actual moment. A woman in her late sixties opens an envelope from her carrier, doesn't recognize the term on the first line, and reaches for her phone. She doesn't open a browser and type a sentence. She opens the camera, points it at the paper, and taps the Lens icon that already sits inside her phone's own camera app. Whatever page Google decides best matches that photograph is the page she lands on, not the page that happens to rank highest for the typed phrase an agent might guess she'd use. If your site has never published an image that actually resembles the document she's holding, with real alt text describing it, you were never a candidate for that result. Not because you ranked lower. Because you were never in the running to begin with.

How Google decides a search counts as multimodal

A search counts as multimodal when an image did some or all of the work a typed query usually does. Google's announcement names four specific entry points, and it's worth knowing all four by name, because each one shows up differently on a phone versus a desktop.¹

None of these four require the person to know the right words for what they're looking at. That's precisely the problem they solve, and precisely why they matter for insurance. A client doesn't always know whether the letter in their hand is a non-renewal notice, an Annual Notice of Change, or a Summary of Benefits. They know what it looks like. Lens, Circle to Search, and the other three entry points let them search from the object itself instead of from a description of it they'd have to construct first.

Where Lens and Circle to Search actually came from

Neither of these is a brand new product dressed up in a new report. Google first announced Google Lens at Google I/O in May 2017, pitched then as a way for a phone's camera to identify a restaurant, a flower, or a concert poster and hand back relevant information inside Google Assistant.⁸ Circle to Search is newer and narrower: Google's own blog post announcing it states it launched January 31, 2024 on the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, and the Samsung Galaxy S24 series, letting someone circle, highlight, or tap anything on their screen, not just a photo, to run a Lens powered search without leaving whatever app they're in.⁸ What changed on September 24, 2026 isn't the underlying technology. It's that Google finally started telling individual site owners, through their own Search Console property, whether either one is sending anyone their way.

What you can see, and what you still can't

The Performance report UI shows multimodal impressions and clicks broken out by page, country, device, and date, the same dimensions you're used to for ordinary Web search. What it does not show, by design, is the Queries tab. Most multimodal searches don't start with typed words at all, so there's no query string to report. You can see that a page earned 40 multimodal impressions last week. You cannot see what the person was looking at when they got there.

There's a second, more practical gap. I checked Google's own Search Analytics API reference this session, the same endpoint any custom dashboard or reporting tool would call to pull Search Console data programmatically. Its documented list of allowed values for the search type filter is web, image, video, news, googleNews, and discover.² No multimodal value exists. If your agency, your marketing vendor, or an FMO's reporting dashboard pulls Search Console numbers through the API rather than the dashboard UI, that pipeline is still reporting web as text-only data and has no idea the split exists. The new number is real. It just isn't wired into automated reporting yet.

The new number is real. It just isn't wired into automated reporting yet, which means the only place to see it right now is the dashboard you're probably not opening every week.

Why this lands differently depending on what you sell

A Medicare or ACA book carries more of this exposure than a life or final expense book does, and it's worth saying why instead of assuming it. Medicare and ACA clients handle physical objects constantly during AEP and open enrollment: a card, an Annual Notice of Change, a Summary of Benefits, a formulary printout, a premium bill that suddenly changed. Those are things a person holds, reads, gets confused by, and photographs. A life insurance policy or an annuity contract gets signed once and filed away. Nobody circles a universal life illustration with their phone six months after closing. If your book leans Medicare or ACA, the entry points in the table above are worth real attention. If it leans life, final expense, or annuities, this is still worth checking, just with lower urgency and a shorter list of pages to fix first.

What this is worth, and what not knowing costs

Three weeks of data isn't enough to build an insurance-specific benchmark, and it would be dishonest to hand you one that doesn't exist yet. Nobody, including us, has a verified figure for what share of insurance agency search traffic is currently multimodal. What does exist, sourced and dated, is the scale of the underlying behavior Google is now finally measuring for individual sites.

In prepared remarks at a press briefing on March 12, 2026, Google's Vice President of Global Advertising, Dan Taylor, put monthly Google Lens volume at more than 25 billion visual searches, with 20% of those carrying commercial intent, meaning the person was in some kind of buying or comparison mindset when they searched.⁴ That figure was reported independently by multiple outlets covering the same briefing, with consistent wording across them.⁴ Do the arithmetic on Taylor's own two numbers and roughly 5 billion of those monthly Lens searches carry commercial intent, against roughly 20 billion that don't.

What that scale actually costs an agency that ignores it isn't a traffic number, because no one can source one yet. It's the plainer kind of cost: you cannot optimize for a channel you cannot see, and until three weeks ago, you couldn't see this one. An agency that keeps publishing generic stock photography with no alt text isn't losing to a competitor who's beating them at multimodal search. Both of them are flying blind. The cost of waiting is that whoever starts describing their images properly first gets however many weeks or months of head start before this becomes the obvious thing everyone tells agents to do.

The timing is worth saying plainly, since this guide publishes on October 1, 2026. AEP opens October 15 and runs through December 7, the single heaviest search window most Medicare and ACA agency sites see all year. Every photographed card, letter, and formulary page that's about to get circled, Lens-searched, or uploaded this fall is a search your site either has a described image ready to answer, or doesn't. Fixing alt text this week costs an afternoon. Fixing it in November, after the search volume has already peaked and moved on, costs the same afternoon for a smaller share of the season's traffic.

Check your own Search Console this week

This takes about five minutes and tells you whether you're already earning multimodal impressions or starting from zero.

1. Open the Performance report

In Search Console, go to Performance, then Search results. Set the date range to the last 28 days so it covers the rollout window.

2. Filter by search type

Click Search type, and you should now see Web split into two sub-options alongside the older Image, Video, News, and Discover choices. Select the multimodal option.

3. Read the Pages tab, not Queries

The Queries tab will be empty or near-empty for this filter, by design. Go straight to Pages and sort by impressions. Whatever shows up there is the content Google has already matched to an image-based search, however small the number.

4. Note which pages show up, and which don't

If your highest multimodal impressions land on pages with strong, specific images, carrier logos, a labeled Medicare card graphic, a plan comparison chart, that's a signal worth building on. If nothing shows up at all, or only your homepage does, that's your honest starting point. Either way, now you know, instead of guessing.

The fix: what makes an image find-able

Google's own guide to images in Search, last updated March 2, 2026, is specific about what actually helps, and none of it is exotic.³ Four things matter, in roughly this order of effort versus payoff.

Write alt text that describes the image, not the keyword you want to rank for

Google's guidance states plainly: "The most important attribute when it comes to providing more metadata for an image is the alt text (text that describes an image), which also improves accessibility for people who can't see images on web pages, including users who use screen readers or have low-bandwidth connections."³ It also warns against keyword stuffing, recommending contextual, information rich descriptions instead of repetitive phrases.³ "Medicare Advantage HMO plan" as alt text on every single image on a page helps nobody. "A side by side comparison of HMO and PPO plan networks, showing in-network-only coverage for HMO against in and out of network coverage for PPO" describes an actual image a camera-based search could plausibly match.

Name the file like a person would describe it

Google's own example is almost comically plain: use a descriptive filename like my-new-black-kitten.jpg instead of IMG00023.JPG or image1.jpg.³ Most insurance agency media libraries are full of the second kind. Renaming a file costs nothing and takes ten seconds per image.

Put the image near the text it illustrates

Google explicitly recommends placing images near the relevant text on a page that is topically related to the image's subject matter.³ A plan comparison graphic belongs on the plan comparison page, next to the plan comparison text, not buried in a generic "resources" gallery three clicks away from anything that explains what it shows.

Mark it up and make sure it can actually be found

Structured data that enables rich results in Google Images, and an image sitemap that helps Google discover images it might otherwise miss, including ones served from a CDN, round out Google's own list of what helps.³ This is the one step that benefits from a site built to do it automatically rather than hand-maintained.

How we build this in by default

We build insurance agency websites on Astro, which ships zero JavaScript to the browser by default, so pages arrive as finished HTML. Our builds score 90+ on Lighthouse performance on mobile and desktop, and some score 100.⁶ None of that is specific to multimodal search, but it's the foundation everything else sits on, since a slow page that never finishes loading its images gives Google less to work with regardless of how well you describe them.

On top of that foundation, every page we ship carries the schema stack that answer engines and image search both lean on: Organization, Service, Article, FAQ, and breadcrumb markup that actually matches what's on the page. Real, descriptive alt text and sensible file naming are part of how we build a page, not an optional extra someone has to remember to add later. The two explainer images in this guide are a working example: both carry alt text that describes exactly what the graphic shows, in enough detail that the description alone would tell you the content even without seeing the image.

We also build real quoters and comparison tools wired to live federal data, not a static form with example numbers pulled from last year's rates. That distinction carries over to how those tools should eventually be built for a visual search world: a plan comparison widget that renders its output as a real, labeled graphic, with the carrier names and coverage differences actually printed on it, gives Google something to match against an image-based query. A quoter that only outputs numbers into an unlabeled table on screen gives Lens or Circle to Search nothing to recognize later if someone screenshots it or photographs a printout of it.

Per the live pricing page, verified today, Digital Foundation's Starter tier covers a complete, compliant site built this way, and Pro and Scale add a weekly or daily publishing cadence on top of it, each new page built with the same image discipline as the last.⁷ That matters here specifically because this is still a new surface. Nobody, including Google, fully knows yet which kinds of insurance content earn multimodal impressions and which don't. A site that publishes consistently, with real described images every time, accumulates more shots on an unproven target than one that publishes once and stops.

What changes for your agency

None of this replaces ranking well in ordinary text search, and none of it is a reason to panic about a report that's three weeks old. It's a second, smaller lane opening up next to the one you already compete in.

When this doesn't change much for you

If your site runs on a handful of static brochure pages and you have no plans to add new content, a multimodal search filter in a dashboard you rarely open isn't going to move your business this quarter. Fix the worst alt text offenders on your highest traffic pages and move on. The bigger payoff is for agencies that already publish regularly and can fold this into content they're producing anyway, rather than agencies treating it as a reason to start a whole new workstream.

Questions agents ask about multimodal search