Multimodal search means asking with more than text. Snapping a photo of a product, or speaking a question aloud, and having the AI interpret it and answer. It's no longer a niche: Google reported that more than one in six AI Mode searches now arrive as voice or image, with image-based queries growing fast.
For brands, this raises the bar on what a machine can understand about you. A voice query is usually longer and more conversational; an image query depends on the engine recognizing your product, which leans on clear product imagery, alt text, and structured data.
The practical implication: facts about your products need to exist in formats different query types can reach. Descriptive text and labelled images and structured attributes. A page that only "looks right" to a human, with its real information locked in pictures a crawler can't read, loses the multimodal branches of the fan-out.