Definition
What this term means
Search technology that allows users to find information by uploading or pointing a camera at an image, rather than typing a text query. Powered by AI image recognition and multimodal models, visual search can identify products, landmarks, plants, text within images, and more. Google Lens, Pinterest Lens, and Bing Visual Search are the most widely used visual search platforms.
Why it matters
The business impact
Visual search is particularly valuable for e-commerce, retail, and design industries where users often know what they want to find but cannot easily describe it in words. Brands that optimise their images with descriptive filenames, comprehensive alt text, product schema markup, and high-quality photography are more likely to be matched and recommended through visual search, opening a discovery channel that text-only optimisation cannot reach.
Used in context
How you might use this term
“A furniture retailer optimised their entire product image library with descriptive filenames, detailed alt text, and product schema markup including colour, dimensions, and material. Their visual search visibility increased significantly, with Google Lens matches driving a new stream of high-intent traffic from users who photographed similar items and were directed to their products.”
Related terms
Explore connected concepts
Multimodal AI
AI systems capable of processing, understanding, and generating multiple types of content, including text, images, audio, and video, within a single model. Multimodal AI can interpret a product photograph, read text overlaid on an image, understand a spoken query, and generate a response that combines text with visual elements. Models like GPT-4o and Gemini are natively multimodal.
Schema Markup
A standardised vocabulary maintained by Schema.org, a collaboration between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, that provides a common language for structured data on the web. Schema markup defines hundreds of entity types (Organisation, Product, Article, Person, Event, etc.) and their properties, enabling web publishers to describe their content in a way that any search engine or AI system can understand.
Semantic Search
A search approach that understands the meaning and intent behind a query rather than simply matching keywords. Semantic search uses NLP, embeddings, and knowledge graphs to interpret what a user is actually looking for, even if their query uses different words than your content. This technology powers both modern search engines and AI-assisted retrieval systems.