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Visual Search Study:How Google Ranks Google Lens
Results

Visual Search Ranking Factors
Brian Dean

Written by Brian Dean

We analyzed 65,388 Google Lens search results to better understand how visual search works.

Specifically, we looked at potential ranking factors that Google may use in its Lens algorithm, including:

  • Alt text
  • Domain Authority
  • URLs
  • Title tags
  • Responsive design

And in this post I’m going to share what we discovered.

A Summary of Our Most Interesting Findings is As Follows:

1. 32.5% of all Google Lens results have a “matching” keyword in the page’s title tag. Therefore, keyword-optimized title tags may help a page rank in Google Lens.

2. A high proportion of Google Lens results are pulled from images high up on a page. In fact, approximately 1/3rd of all Google Lens image results appear in the top 25% of a web page.

3. 11.4% of all Google Lens result images contain alt text terms that match the keyword someone just searched for.

4. Authoritative pages and websites appear to have a ranking advantage in Google Lens. Google Lens results have an average Moz Page Authority of 35.2 and a Domain Authority of 64.4.

5. Google Lens may confer a ranking advantage to sites that work well on mobile devices. 90.6% of all Google Lens results come from mobile-friendly websites.

6. Google Lens results come from relatively slow-loading pages. In fact, the average First Contentful Paint load time for a Google Lens result is 3,186ms.

7. Pinterest and Amazon are the two top-performing websites in Google Lens. 7.2% of all Google Lens results come from Pinterest, while 4.1% are from Amazon.

8. Keyword-rich URLs correlate with Google Lens rankings. 29.9% of the Google Lens results in our analysis had an associated keyword in the page’s URL.

9. Responsive images don’t appear to confer a major ranking advantage in Google Lens. Only 13.1% of Google Lens images are responsive.

10. Images with filenames that “match” a Google Lens search appear to rank more often than images with a missing or irrelevant filename. We found that 22.6% of Google Lens result images had a filename that matched the Google Lens search.

11. Websites that rank seem to have an edge in Google Lens. We discovered that 15% of all Google Lens results also rank on the first page of Google organic for the same search term.

12. The average visual search result page contains 1,631 words. Considering that Google uses text around an image to understand an image’s content and context, this finding makes sense.

Keyword-Rich Title Tags and URLs Correlate With Google Lens Rankings

With Google Lens, the image that you search with is your “keyword”.

We used the Google Vision API to turn those visual searches into text-based keywords.

Google Vision API – Web Entities Empire State Building

This allowed us to analyze visual search terms as text-based entities (using labels from Google themselves).

For example, take this Google Lens “keyword”:

Example Search With Image Of Cat

The Google Vision API turned that image into a “best guess label”: “cat”.

Google Vision API – Cat Result

We then looked at whether that text-based label correlated with potential Google Lens ranking factors.

In fact, that’s how we were able to correlate title tag keywords and Google Lens rankings.

We found 32.5% of pages that rank in Google Lens have a keyword in their title tag that matches the search image’s Google Vision label.

Pages That Rank In Google Lens Have A Keyword That Matches The Search Images Google Vision Label

For example, here is one of the visual searches from our dataset.

Example Visual Search – Tesla Cybertruck

Sure enough, Google Vision’s label (“tesla cybertruck”), appears in the title tag for that page.

Tesla Cybertruck In Title Tag

Google has previously stated that they use a page’s title tag to rank Google Images results.

Google Use Page Title Tag For Lens Rankings

It would make sense that they’d also use keywords in a page’s title tag for Google Lens rankings.

In other words, Google may prefer images on pages “about” that image vs. pages that have a matching image in the middle of an otherwise irrelevant page.

Google Prefers Images On Pages About That Image

Indeed, that’s what our data showed.

Key Takeaway: Pages with titles and URLs that “match” a Google Lens search term may have a rankings advantage over those that don’t. With visual search, the image that you search with is your “keyword”.

33% of Google Lens Result Images Appear Towards The Top of a Page

We found that 33.1% Google Lens results are from images from the top 25% of a webpage.

33% Of Google Lens Results Are From Images From The Top 25% Of A Webpage

For example, take this result from our data set.

Google Lens – Result From Data Set

If you look at the page this image is pulled from, you can see that the image appears quite high on the page (well above the fold).

Google Lens Example – Position On Web Page

This finding is in line with Google’s “Making visual content more useful in Search” blog post.

In that post they state that the algorithm “prioritizes” images high up on the page.

Google Algorithm Prioritizes Images High On Page

Our findings here are consistent with that statement.

Key Takeaway: Images that are higher up on a web page appear to have a significant ranking advantage in Google Lens.

A Fairly Low Number of Google Lens Result Images Contain Matching Alt Text

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide states that they use alt text to understand images in their index.

Google Alt Text Makes It Easier

However, it’s not clear how important alt text is. Or whether it’s used in the Google Lens algorithm at all. Which is why we decided to see how often Google Lens result images had alt text that matched the visual search term that they ranked for.

We found that 11.4% of all Google Lens results contain alt text that “matches” the best-guess label for the search image.

Google Lens Results Contain Alt Text That Matches The Best Guess Label

For example, the best-guess label for this visual search is “yoga poses”.

Yoga Poses Example Search

And here are the results for that Google Lens search.

Google Lens – Yoga Image Results

In this case, 2 out of the 4 Google Lens results contain “yoga poses” in their alt text.

Yoga Pose Alt Text Overlay

11.4% isn’t an insignificant number. But it doesn’t suggest a strong relationship. If alt text was an important part of the Google Lens algorithm, we would expect to see more of the results to have exact match or partial match anchor text.

Key Takeaway: 11.4% of Google Lens image alt text match the search term that they rank for. Therefore, alt text may play a minimal role in Google Lens optimization.

Google Lens Results Have a High Page Authority and Domain Authority

It’s no secret that, all things being equal, an authority page on an authority site will outrank pages with less authority.

We wanted to know whether this same rule applied to Google Lens.

After all, Google themselves state that a recent visual search algorithm update made it so that authority pages had an edge in the results.

Google Blog – The Authority Of A Web Page

So we looked up Moz’s Domain Authority and Page Authority for each of our 65,388 Google Lens results.

And we found that Google Lens results tend to come from fairly authoritative sites and pages.

In fact, an average Google Lens result has a Page Authority of 35 and a Domain Authority of 64. Both fairly high.

An Average Google Lens Result Has A Page Authority Of 35 And A Domain Authority Of 64

It may be that Google directly uses link authority in the Google Lens algorithm. Or this relationship could simply be a case of “correlation not equaling causation”.

That’s because a high DA and PA tend to be byproducts of publishing high-quality content. And high-quality content is something that Google states is extremely important for visual search rankings.

In fact, in Google’s “Google Image best practices” documentation, they go as far as to say the quality of the content on the page is as important as the image itself.

Google Blog – Good Content Is Just As Important

Key Takeaway: We found that pages with a high Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority tend to rank well in Google Lens. This may be because Google Lens ranks pages with lots of backlinks. Or it could be that DA and PA are byproducts of publishing high-quality content.

The Vast Majority of Google Lens Results Come From Mobile-Friendly Sites

We found that 90.6% of all Google Lens image results are pages that pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Google Lens Image Results Are Pages That Pass Googles Mobile Friendly Test

It makes sense that Google Lens would prefer to rank sites that are optimized for mobile. After all, essentially 100% of Google Lens searches are done on mobile devices.

And it would be a pretty poor user experience to send users to sites that didn’t work well on mobile, even if the image itself was a great result for the search.

In fact, Google’s recommendations for image SEO emphasize the importance of “device-friendly” web design.

Google Blog – Device Friendly Web Design

Key Takeaway: Approximately 90% of all pages with images ranking in Google Lens are mobile-friendly.

The Average First Contentful Paint Loading Speed of a Google Lens Result is 3,186ms

We decided to see if page loading speed played a role in Google Lens rankings.

For this analysis we measured First Contentful Paint (FCP) speed for our 65,388 Google Lens results.

We chose FCP for the simple reason that FCP is the time that many of a page’s assets (including images) appear. This is likely more important to someone conducting a visual search than Time to First Byte (TTFB), which doesn’t affect what users see on a page.

And we found that the average FCP for a Google Lens result was 3,186ms.

The Average FCP For A Google Lens Results In 3186ms

Based on recent page speed benchmarks, a 3,000+ FPC can be considered somewhat slow. However, this finding needs to be taken into context.

Pages that rank well in visual search tend to be image-heavy. Which adds significant size to any page.

In fact, we found that the average Google lens result contains an average of 34 total images.

The Average Google Lens Result Contains An Average 34 Total Images

That’s a lot of images on a single page. And when you take that fact into account, an image-heavy page that takes 3,000ms to reach FCP isn’t so bad.

While Google hasn’t said whether speed plays a role in their visual search algorithm, they do recommend that people that want to rank in Google Images should speed things up.

Google Blog – Optimize For Speed

So it could be that Google uses page speed as a visual search ranking signal. And that, due to the image-heavy nature of the pages that appear in visual search, 3,186ms puts a page into the top tier in terms of FCP.

Key Takeaway: Google Lens results don’t load significantly faster than the average webpage. In fact, the average Google Lens result FPC load time is 3,186ms. This may be due to the fact that visual search results tend to contain several high-quality images.

Pinterest and Amazon Rank For a Large Number of Visual Searches

Next, we decided to look at the distribution of websites that appear in Google Lens results.

Here’s the full breakdown:

Pinterest And Amazon Rank For A Large Number Of Visual Searches

As you can see, Pinterest and Amazon rank significantly more often than any other site.

In fact, 1/10 Google Lens results come from these two sites alone.

This finding aligns with a lot of our findings thus far. Amazon.com and Pinterest.com both have a high Moz Domain Authority (96 and 94 respectively).

They also have fast loading times. And are built to be mobile friendly.

Importantly, both sites tend to have images appear at the very top of the page (usually above the fold).

Amazon Pinterest – Home Pages

However, outside of these outliers, Google Lens results are fairly diverse. 80.2% of Google Lens results are from the “other” category. Which means that no single set (or set of sites) completely dominates Google Lens results.

Key Takeaway: Pinterest and Amazon tend to rank most often Google Lens results. 11.3% of all visual search results are from these two websites.

Relatively Few Google Lens Images Are Responsive

Unlike some of the other factors that we analyzed, Google hasn’t stated that responsive images play a role in their visual search algorithm. But they do consider responsive images a Google Image SEO best practice because they “lead to better user experience”.

Google Blog – Responsive Images

While that may be the case, we didn’t find a strong relationship between responsive images and visual search rankings.

In fact, only 13% of the results in Google Lens are responsive.

Only 13% Of The Results In Google Lens Are Responsive

Key Takeaway: While responsive images may improve UX, they don’t appear to directly influence visual search.

Descriptive Image Filenames May Play a Role in Google Lens Results

Filenames have been an important Google Images ranking factor since its inception. Before Google gained the ability to recognize images with AI, they blindly trusted alt text and image filenames to understand the content of an image.

However, despite Google’s image recognition technology coming a long way, they still rely on filenames.

Google Blog – Image File Names

Which may explain the fact that a high number of images in the visual search results (22.6%) have a filename that aligns with what the person searched for in Google Lens.

Percentage Of Results That Have A Filename That Aligns With What The Person Searched For In Google Lens

For example, this Google Lens result has a filename (astronaut-deep-space-image-science-fiction-fantasy-in-high-resolution-picture) that closely matches one of the Google Vision labels (“space astronaut”) for the search image.

Astronaut example search

Key Takeaway: Google may use keywords that appear in an image’s filename as part of the Google Lens algorithm.

Google Lens Results Often Also Rank in Google Organic

Google’s visual search algorithm takes the relevancy of the page and website into account.

Here’s an example that Google recently gave to explain how site relevancy impacts visual search results:

Google Blog – DIY Search

We wanted to understand how this potentially important ranking factor may impact Google Lens searches.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to “look up” the relevancy of a website. But we can use a site’s organic Google rankings as a proxy measurement of relevancy.

For example, a site ranking highly in Google’s organic search results for the keyword “organic gardening” is considered by Google to be a relevant result for “organic gardening”.

And that may give that site a visual search SEO edge for searches related to organic gardening.

Indeed, that’s what the data in our analysis showed.

15% of the websites that rank in Google Lens also rank in Google’s organic top 10 results for that same term.

15% Of Websites That Rank In Google Lens Also Rank In Googles Organic Top 10 Results

For example, look at the #1 result in Google Lens when searching with an image of a mouse:

Google Lens – Mouse Search

That result comes from corkyspest.com.

Google Vision describes this image as “common california mice”.

Sure enough, when you search for “common california mice” in Google organic, corkyspest.com ranks #1 for that same term:

Common California Mice

Key Takeaway: 15% of all Google Lens results also rank on the first page of Google’s “normal” organic search results.

The Average Word Count of a Google Lens Result Page is 1,631 Words

Our analysis found that Google Lens result pages tend to be fairly text-heavy. In fact, Google Lens images come from pages that contain an average of 1,631 words of text.

The Average Word Count Of A Google Lens Result Page Is 1631 Words

Why the relationship?

Well, Google officially recommends that “images are placed near relevant text”.

Google Blog – Images Placed Near Relevant Text

That’s because Google uses the text around an image to understand the content and context of that image.

Google Uses The Text Around An Image To Understand The Context Of That Image

Therefore, a page with considerable supporting text is going to have an advantage in visual search compared to a page that’s made up of 100% images.

Key Takeaway: Pages with a large amount of supporting text may perform best in visual search. Google Lens result pages contain an average of 1,631 words.

Summary and Conclusion

I’d like to thank Backlinko’s CTO, Lloyd Jones, for leading this study.

And if you’d like to learn more about how we conducted this analysis, here’s a PDF that details our methods.

Now I’d like to hear from you:

What’s your #1 takeaway from this Google Lens study?

Or maybe you have a question about something that you read.

Either way, I’d like to hear what you have to say. So go ahead and leave a comment below right now.

122 Comments

  1. PACKED with insight, as usual 🙌

    Your findings on filename are particularly interesting… Something super simple that previously slipped under my radar.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Eric. For sure: it could be just correlation. But it’s also possible that Google uses a filename as a “hint” of what an image is. Which makes sense as most people name their images based on what the image is about.

  2. Brian, great work as always. Its especially interesting that responsive images didn’t convey any direct ranking advantage. Something I need to think about.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Jim. That was definitely surprising. I mean, it probably makes sense to use responsive images for UX. But it may not impact visual search rankings.

  3. Thank you for such valuable post Brian.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      No worries, Gary. Hope you found it useful.

  4. Omar Avatar Omarsays:

    Hi Brian, OK so Google is able to understand the image better if it has text within the image? But what happens if the text is distorted? And I would like to know how does this visual search algorithm actually work?
    Thanks,
    Omar

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Omar, we fond that text on the page may help Google understand the image. I’m not sure if that applies to text inside of the image itself.

      1. I do believe it might help. Facebook AI can read text on images and auto generate ALT titles. I belive that Google is miles ahead of Facebook.

        1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

          I’m sure they read it. But I don’t know if they use that as a ranking signal. For example, I don’t think an image with word text “cat” on it will rank higher for “cat”.

  5. Jacob Jack Avatar Jacob Jacksays:

    Informative and insightful! A Greatly composed blog post!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Jacob 👍👍👍

  6. Indeed millions of people today are using Google Lens and more will be using in the coming future.
    The tips that you shared today will surely help me to rank on those SERPS also.
    Thanks a lot, Brian!
    Hoping to learn more amazing things from you in the upcoming posts

    Regards,
    Abhishek

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      That’s true: Google Lens is growing insanely fast. Which shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. It’s super useful.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Damian.

  7. Brian, what I love about your posts is that you follow the cardinal rule of good SEO. You make AWESOME content. Some of it is above where I am from a skills perspective, but I always learn a ton. Thank you!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks man. I appreciate that 👍👍👍

  8. Every time I read Backlinko, I kinda feel I have got some superpower. So stupid to miss this insightful stuff here

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      👍👍👍

  9. Charandeep Kapoor Avatar Charandeep Kapoorsays:

    Great Post Brian!

    However a big surprise at point number 6-Average FCP at 3,186ms!!!
    I understand that the pages which appered on Google Lens searches tend to be image-heavy and thus slow loading, but isn’t this slow load time against the premise of Google ranking pages with faster load times higher due to better user experience?

  10. You’ve done the perfect justice to this.

    Naturally, i would have thought Google would rank pages with less text for this…

    But it seems they still favor in-depth content for the visual search.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks. It makes sense if you think about it: text content helps them understand the context of the image a bit more.

  11. Hi, I’m curious how you do these studies. What’s your process for researching, writing, and figuring out if your in-depth post and report will grow your blog. I’m 15 and I’m working on writing a mattress report that once finished, EVERYONE will link to in the sleeping industry. Any tips?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      That’s tough to explain in a tweet. But the basic gist is that you need to find a data source. Extract the data (or scrape it). Then analyze it. I’m oversimplifying it 1000x. But that’s the high level process.

  12. Amazing research as always, thanks for sharing.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      No worries.

  13. Anything that comes from your YouTube channel or this website is ALL good. Every single thing you write or saw is proven to be good and everything you say has helped me get more traffic. Keep it up!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Tim 👍👍👍

  14. Brian’s posts are almost always worth reading. Not this one though.

    67000 images study, wow sounds pretty much, but in fact with so many images it could easily be a one image study. Just pick an image, chair for example. You can surely make more profound analysis about it than just generalizing.

    Images are part in every SEO campaign, but just a small part.
    My personal opinion is it’s always better to Focus on couple of things and become one of the best, instead of trying to cover all aspects.

    Focus beats divercity every time?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Peter, I don’t understand what you mean. So the sample size isn’t massive therefore the findings aren’t valid?

      1. Hi Brian,

        What I mean is sample size is less important if it’s not focused.

        You will probably agree a study on similar images will be more valuable, than just a general one.
        You can analyse particular object/animal/etc image ( just a single one) – a garden chair for example.

        It will help us better understand and focus on the right image ranking factors.

  15. Wow! (Yet again) Thank you Brian and Lloyd. You are way ahead of the competition with these posts. Still way ahead of me -on Google Lens-, but once I catch up a bit I will re-read and implement. Amazing!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Dave. Google Lens is still super super early. But it’s growing insanely fast. So if it ends up being a mainstream Google feature this study will hopefully be useful to people.

  16. Dear Brian,

    Great work! Great post! Looking forward read more useful posts from you!Thank you!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Sergy 👍

  17. The question is…

    …why do you use a serif-font in some of your posts, and a non-serif font in other posts?

    🙂

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      LOL. That’s mostly a design choice. I prefer serif fonts in most cases.

  18. Great stuff!

    However it would have been helpful to start off with “What is Google Lens?”.

    I had to google that after reading this info packed post.

    Muz

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Muz, you’re probably right about that. Google Lens is growing but it’s still not mainstream.

  19. I’ve always wanted to learn about this. Now I have a really good post to go through. Thanks again Brian!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Awesome, Darshana 👍👍👍

  20. Hey buddy, great job. I love the screenshots, so nice and clear.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Marcio

  21. Main takeaway after reviewing my notes. Be more detailed in my images text, alt text and surround my images with relevant content. 1600+ word count? That’s not for me. Use the image url in my copy. Be more aware of image size and make concentrate on making my web pages more mobile friendly. Finally, use keywords in my title tag. Great article.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Randy.

  22. Janice Baird Avatar Janice Bairdsays:

    Hi Brian – thank you – very insightful.
    Suggestion – when you send out emails, show the Sender as “Brian Dean – Backlinko – best seo”. I nearly deleted your email because I didn’t immediately recognise the source!
    Cheers
    Janice

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Janice, thank you. Very weird that it shows that as the sender. What email client do you use?

  23. Hi Brian,
    This was my first introduction to Google Lens. Until now I was unaware there was such a thing.

    I found it particularly interesting that the images contain alt text terms that match the keyword. I have generally been rather slack with the alt text field. Often leaving it empty.

    Need to lift my game

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Ian, cheers. I think that alt text is one of those little SEO tasks that’s worth doing. It won’t make or break your organic or visual search rankings. But it can help.

  24. 67.5% of Google lens results don’t have a matching keyword in the title tag.
    Therefore, a title tag that isn’t optimized may help you rank in Google lens results.

    🤣🤣🤣

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      😂 That would be taking “correlation = causation” to the extreme.

  25. Wow, Brian. It was really an amazing post about Google Lens results. I really found shocked by some of your most interesting findings of Google Lens especially no.9 and no.10 that the responsive images don’t have a ranking advantage and images file names matching the search of Google Lens rank more.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Jatin, that surprised me too. Looks like the fundamentals still make a difference.

  26. Thanks for another great content.
    Does Google page experience update impact on the visual search??

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      I’m not 100% sure about that. Google Lens and the Google core web vitals report are new. But I’d guess that Google would use it for visual search results too.

  27. Hi Brian,

    Great work! It’s very useful.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Ryan, no worries. Glad it helped you out.

  28. I was doing a lot of Pinterest marketing lately thinking of the similar stuffs but I did not have any data.

    Now I can say that those efforts are well worth it and I’ll keep on doing it for visual search rankings.

    However, haven’t seen any big results yet.

    Hoping for the best. Thanks for such a valuable information.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      👍👍👍

  29. Jan Avatar Jansays:

    Hi Brian. I started another website 5 days ago which is very image intensive. Thanks, I got a few ideas which I will also implement, and make it Lens friendly also.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Jan, this is perfect timing then. Hope it helps you out.

  30. Great Brian,
    Like always you have produced another great content. We need to take visual search as an opportunity.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks

  31. Think the biggest takeaway here is while Google Lens and Google Search are two different products there are noticeable similarities in winners on both.

    The trick here is still to win at Google and hope that Lens will show a similar return?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Robert, for sure. Like with YouTube, the algorithms have a lot of similarities and differences. I would say that Google Lens is so early that it probably doesn’t make sense to optimize specifically for it… yet. As you said, I’d just focus on winning at Google Search and hope that it translates to higher rankings in Google Lens.

  32. Tim Avatar Timsays:

    Hi Brian,

    Thanks for the incredibly detailed explanation on Google Lens. It is good to see that most SEO techniques do work well when trying to rank for Google Lens.

    I do wonder though, do you know of, or have done, research into the use and effectiveness of Google Lens?

    I work in the Netherlands and while I value staying ahead with SEO knowledge, I do wonder how long it will take for certain features to work internationally as well.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Tim, you’re welcome. Do you mean how good Google Lens is at identifying objects?

  33. Thanks for the great detailed explanation on Google Lens, Brian.
    Always good to see innovation.
    I also can connect with catch that google put in Blogspot comment
    haha.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Olivier. For sure: Google Lens is a legit innovation in search.

  34. Naina Singh Avatar Naina Singhsays:

    Hi Brian,
    Awesome and fantastic post loaded with full of highly valubable information about visual search results and tactics. You’re just amazing. Keep sharing more like this.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Naina

  35. David Kartuzinski Avatar David Kartuzinskisays:

    I feel like I am the only one on the planet who has never used Google Lens! It seems this advice would be applicable to image search as well. Thanks for the great article.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi David, you’re definitely not alone. It’s still pretty new.

  36. How is possibile to analyzed 65,388 Google Lens search results?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      There’s a PDF methods at the bottom of the post.

  37. This is some very useful information as always. Some of those things are common sense but some others are really interesting.
    Especially, the data you provide.
    Keep up the hard work!
    We want to read more from you and more often!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Tasos. If you want to hear from me more often, sign up to the newsletter. I’m always emailing out cool stuff.

  38. Hi Brian Dean,

    I am offering digital marketing course and your articles and case studies are the benchmark for all of my resources. As usual your content related to Google lens was highly insightful and I loved the explanation of technical content using the graphical method.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      👍👍👍

  39. I tried on many products that I already owned. Seems that only Amazon is best optimized for visual search. In my case, here in India, about 95% of the time, Amazon results came up. Is there any tag we are missing here?

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hey Gary, that may be because you mostly searched for products. If you do more everyday objects (like a glass of water, a dog etc.) you’ll probably see Pinterest in the results more.

  40. Ciao Brian!
    Beautiful article!
    I was still studying the vocal searches and I had not yet considered the visual ones!
    Thanks for the valuable and complete update!
    Greetings from Italy!
    Dario

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Dario, Grazie! I think text-based searches will be #1 for a while. But voice and visual will start to ship away at them soon. For certain searches, visual and voice makes more sense.

  41. Perfecto!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thank you.

  42. Anish Lal Shrestha Avatar Anish Lal Shresthasays:

    It’s awesome to see Brian’s and his team come up with new study that’s helping millions of people a better understanding.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      👍👍👍

  43. This is a awesome work and data research Brian.
    But why do I have to optimize my page for this alone when the searchers will only end up reading the title or just description without visiting my website.

    35 of 100 searchers will click the links.

    Some will just download images and go.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Jide, I don’t think you need to optimize for Google Lens yet. But it’s going to be an important part of how people search in the future.

  44. It’s really an amazing guide. Like voice search one day we also start searching from visuals. Google Lens is now in its beginning era, soon we’ll see many apps like this.
    BTW its really an amazing guide for marketers and a normal guy.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Divesh, thanks. Definitely: I think visual search is a legit trend that’s going to stick.

  45. Hey Brian, Thank you for doing the heavy lifting with the research. Great work as always. Cheers!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Hi Jatin, no worries.

  46. Excellent post, Brian. It’s a very detailed guide about Google Lens. These tips definitely help my ranking. I feel google new speed matrix definitely affects overall SEO and UX!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Kevin.

  47. Visual is getting used more each day! Thanks for another great article, Brian!

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      You’re welcome, Stephen.

  48. Thank you, Brian.
    I’m just starting to strive to bring my website back to its past standard. About a year ago, my website was getting 6k to 10k unique views per week, down from a 30k views a week three years ago. I upgraded the website design and crashed my views a year ago.
    The rankings never recovered, add to that my blogging and website promotion slacked off.
    Now, I have taken down the website design I had loved, the one that crashed my rankings, and I’ve restored the previous one, (no improvement in ranking as yet) and I’m back to learning what is required in 2020 to create a good website and blog.
    Your blog was my first stop in my build it back. progress. 🙂 I like that your advice is unique and not a carbon copy of others.
    Ryn.

    1. Brian Dean Avatar Brian Deansays:

      Thanks Ryn. I hope your site bounces back.

  49. Whoa, Brian!
    I never thought that images used in the blog can bring an impact like that in improving ranks on Google.
    So is it better to use naturally taken photos than using illustrations? Because I think Google Lens can’t link to an illustration that effectively.
    Eagerly waiting for your response.

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