Check whether search engines can find and understand your images for multimodal search, from crawler access and lazy loading to alt text and schema.

Multimodal search describes the range of inputs search engines now accept from users. Gone are the days when we would have to type in a description of a product we were looking at in a shop when we wanted to run a price comparison. Now, we can simply take a photo of it and use technology like Google Lens to search based purely on that image alone.

Multimodal Search is wider than just using images as inputs. Modern search engines accept searches via keywords, images, voice, or a combination of these. Beyond that, we can use multimodal search to bring back content in a different format type. Use voice to request an image of a dog, and receive back Image Search results. Take a photo of a green dress and use text to ask Google to search for a version in blue.

Whereas in years past, images were just an augmentation of a page’s content, now they are an important entry point in a search journey.

So beyond standard image optimization, what do we need to do differently to make sure our images are ranking well and can be found in this new frontier of multimodal search?

The very first step to ensuring images can be retrieved as part of a multimodal search is to ensure they are crawlable and indexable.

This is a simple step that can be accomplished in two ways:

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