Visual search is reshaping how people discover products online. As AI advances and platforms like Google and Instagram integrate visual results, brands must evolve their SEO strategies beyond keywords to stay competitive.

Remember the days when you spotted something you liked but couldn’t search for it using Google Lens? You’d type clumsy descriptions into Google, hoping the right words would lead you to it.

Thankfully, those days are over. The technology behind apps like Google Lens – visual search – is transforming how people discover products online. And with the rise of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), brands relying solely on text-based SEO risk falling behind.

So what’s driving visual search growth? Why does it matter for your business? And how can you better position yourself in rankings? Read on to find out.

Visual search: What it is and why it matters

Visual search allows people to find products and information using images instead of text.

While the concept isn’t new, recent improvements have made it far more accurate, powerful, and accessible than ever before.

When someone sees a product they love – a unique piece of clothing, for example, or a pair of shoes – they can simply snap a photo (or take a screenshot) and let technology do the detective work.

The artificial intelligence behind visual search has evolved dramatically, becoming much better at analyzing images and finding similar products or information.

It’s perfect for those moments when you can picture exactly what you want, but can’t find the words to explain it.

Over the past few years, Google, Pinterest, Apple and others have upgraded their visual search capabilities to make them more powerful.

For consumers, this creates a smoother, more intuitive shopping experience. Instead of experimenting with multiple keyword combinations, they can simply show the product they want and get instant, relevant results.

These developments go beyond convenience. Visual search is changing how people shop and discover products, making the process more image-led than ever before.

Research shows that 62% of millennials prefer visual search over other ways of seeking information.

More and more users are starting product searches with images instead of keywords, expecting quick, accurate results. For businesses, that means rethinking how they present themselves online.

Google now indexes Instagram: What this means for visual search

Here’s where it gets interesting for brands: Instagram content from public accounts can now appear in Google search results – a game-changer for visibility.

For example, a handmade ceramics brand might see its Instagram posts surface in Google searches for “unique coffee mugs,” reaching audiences beyond its usual followers.

That opens the door to a whole new group of prospective customers who’ve never heard of the brand before.

This is important because Instagram is inherently visual. Those carefully curated product shots and behind-the-scenes videos that perform well on the platform now have the potential to drive traffic from Google searches too.

It’s like getting two marketing channels for the price of one — but only if brands optimize their content so it’s truly discoverable.

How e-commerce democratization is accelerating visual search growth

Platforms like Shopify, Etsy, and social marketplace apps such as Vinted have made it easier than ever for anyone to sell online.

The result? An increasingly crowded and competitive e-commerce landscape.

This accessibility has turned consumers into savvy deal hunters. With countless sellers offering similar products, shoppers are more determined than ever to find the best value.

Visual search fits perfectly into this behavior, making comparison shopping faster and easier.

A customer can spot a lamp they like, run it through visual search, and instantly see similar options from multiple sellers – complete with prices and reviews.

For brands, this democratization offers both opportunities and challenges:

Opportunities

• Great product photography and smart visual search optimization can help small brands compete with major retailers in search results.
• Visual search breaks down language barriers, making it easier for products to be discovered by international customers.
• High-quality images can work across multiple platforms and search systems, often delivering better ROI than traditional advertising when starting out.

Challenges

• More competition means brands must focus on value, customer service, and standing out.
• Higher expectations for visual quality often require better gear or professional photography.
• Staying competitive means keeping up with changing visual search algorithms.
• Brands need to produce fresh visual content regularly to stay relevant.
• Search isn’t “set and forget” – it needs ongoing attention even after early success.
• The playing field may be more level, but getting in front of the right people is still the main challenge.
• Visual search can put small boutiques on the same stage as big brands – but only with smart targeting and measurement.

AI search and its impact on image search

AI is the engine behind modern visual search – and it’s advanced dramatically.

Today’s AI tools can identify not just objects and colors but also styles, moods, and even specific brands from partial views or unusual angles.

It can interpret context within images, detect brand logos in real-world settings, and identify products under varied lighting conditions.

This AI shift is blending traditional text-based results with richer visuals, making visual searches more accurate than ever.

For businesses, this means quality imagery is no longer just about aesthetics – it’s a must for discoverability.

The best results come from pairing strong visual content with accurate, descriptive metadata. Think of it as giving search engines multiple clues to understand and rank your content effectively.

What the growth of visual search means for brands and SEO managers

The ongoing evolution of visual search is pushing brands to think beyond keywords and blog posts.

While traditional SEO has focused on text, modern strategies must also factor in how images perform in increasingly sophisticated visual search results.

This shift means making some practical changes to how visual content is handled.

Products should be photographed clearly from multiple angles, for example, with lighting that shows accurate color and details.

But it’s more than just taking nice photos — images need descriptive file names instead of generic codes, and alt text should naturally explain what’s in the image so AI can interpret it correctly.

The growing link between social media and traditional search results means consistent visual branding is now critical.

That Instagram aesthetic isn’t just for Instagram anymore — those images could appear in Google search results, so they need to represent the brand well across all contexts.

Some key strategies for riding the visual search wave include:

• High-quality, well-lit product photography: Clear images that show products accurately and stand out in visual search results.
• Consistent visual branding: Maintaining the same look and feel across all platforms as search becomes more interconnected.
• Descriptive file names and alt text: Help AI understand image content and improve discoverability.
• Mobile optimization: Ensure images load quickly and display sharply on all devices.

Visual search: How far can it go?

Visual search isn’t a passing trend. As AI continues to advance, expect it to become more accurate and a bigger part of everyday online experiences.

We’ll likely see more platforms and search engines boosting their visual search capabilities, further blending text search with image-led discovery.

The brands that come out on top will be the ones that adapt early – investing in high-quality, strategically optimized visuals that work for both people and algorithms.

It’s not just about hiring a great photographer; it’s about understanding how visual search is evolving and creating content that serves human audiences and AI equally well.

We’re moving from a world where businesses could get by with great written content and okay images, to one where visual excellence is essential for being found.

The future belongs to brands that can tell their story visually and make it easy for both humans and AI to find and understand their content.

The ability to change an image’s content has become easier than ever, thanks in part to GenAI tools. But could distributing an altered image lead a business to face serious consequences? Dan Raywood investigates.

Rewind to Mother’s Day 2024, and most people will probably remember what they were doing. For one mother of three, sharing a photo of herself and her children opened up the reality of image manipulation.

In that case, the photo of the Princess of Wales was later withdrawn amid concerns about manipulation. The intense press coverage around it may even have brought forward the announcement of her cancer diagnosis.

Aside from the impact of the incident, this whole episode highlighted how photo-editing techniques can be used to manipulate and alter images – apparently, in this case, to merge several shots into a single, ideal photo – and the public’s readiness to scrutinize the results.

This was arguably the first incident of its kind – but could we see another altered image cause the sort of disruption that the Royal Family faced?

After all, if an image of a C-level executive were to be altered in order to portray them in a negative way, what would the impact be on them and their business?

Fake news – real consequences

Ilia Kolochenko, CEO at ImmuniWeb and a fellow at the British Computer Society, says there have been “countless incidents where celebrities and politicians were tricked, harassed and blackmailed with deepfakes, fake news, and misinformation.”

He admits that the vast majority of these incidents are “isolated events, and they didn’t really cause disruption.” But there is evidence of several “small but well prepared cyberattacks,” which affected cryptocurrency influencers, where X (formerly Twitter) accounts were compromised, and announcements were posted that encouraged followers to invest in a specific NFT or cryptocurrency. “So we had incidents that caused tangible financial damage,” he says.

Reputational damage

Quantifying the cost of an attack such as one involving reputational damage is particularly hard, especially when compared to a more common cybercrime where you can see a financial loss.

David Sancho, senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, says it’s fairly obvious that a company’s reputation can be damaged by deepfakes. One of the most immediate ways this could happen is by making the company appear to take a stance on a highly sensitive topic — something that can be done relatively easily.

“I don’t know what the agenda behind those attacks might be, because pure reputational damage ‘just because’ is not very likely unless there’s a hidden agenda by the attacker, so that would possibly imply hacktivists,” Sancho says.

“A hacktivist can say ‘look at this company doing this’ just to lower the reputation. It can happen, but I haven’t seen it happen very often.”

He also cites how a stock price could be affected by rough claims, but this would most likely be temporary and if the company denied the claims, then the stock price goes back to normal.

“In that meantime, the attacker can invest in that artificially low stock just to make money later. It can happen. I’m not saying that it hasn’t happened; it probably has. But since it’s very difficult to quantify, it’s very difficult to know. Stock fluctuates, and there’s a lot of bad behavior out there, so I haven’t seen it, but it theoretically is possible.”

Political agenda

Sancho says that this sort of action is undertaken by hacktivists “or people with political agendas,” and it became clear that this would also have to be the action of a very determined individual to make such a series of efforts against a single entity and cause determined damage.

Ultimately, most people may have a bad experience with a product or service, but after calming down, they usually move on. And Sancho says he completely agreed, as “it is probably not worth the effort for most people.” The most likely scenario would be a political campaign where you made an effort to disrupt the other party’s electoral efforts, such as with the Conservative Party’s 1997 “New Labour, New Danger” campaign.

A notable incident from 2020 involved an altered video of Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, where she was apparently shown to be “drunk and slurring her speech.” This was later revealed to have been manipulated, with the clip described as “low quality and jerky.”

Stamp out the impact

These incidents could be damaging if the victim — or their company — is unable to stamp out the impact and prove it to be based on a falsehood. So what can a business do to try to undo the damage or defend itself against this kind of attack?

Sancho says this is a hard situation to recover from “because by the time they open their mouths, the damage is already done, so the only thing they can do is say that this is a lie.” He says there’s not a lot you can do when somebody says false things against you.

“In the context of reputation, it probably will be done only in a political context,” he says. “It’s not impossible, but it just won’t happen very often, unless there is some other political agenda attached to it.”

Kolochenko says we have “almost attained the point of no return” with this sort of disruption, but it has nothing to do with AI “because it was possible before, but now with AI, it’s just cheaper and faster and more efficient.”

He believes that every company is vulnerable to a “massive AI-powered misinformation attack.” He cites an example where someone could create deepfake pornographic videos, and post them on sharing sites and social media – and in many cases, it could spread faster than it can be removed.

This could lead to management being tied up dealing with the aftermath, and a response “may be uncoordinated and unprofessional”. Potentially, mistakes can be made, which would be “more harmful than useful because people will be panicked.”

LLM legacy

Kolochenko says that even after all of the stories are taken down, in six to 18 months, all this data will be scraped by AI crawlers, LLMs will be trained, and in about a year from this incident, details will emerge.

“So AI will be poisoned with this information, and given that people will probably be relying even more on AI, this can lead to catastrophic reputational damage that will be kind of irreparable,” Kolochenko says. “Given that the right to be forgotten with LLMs from a technical viewpoint is non-executable, we have a big challenge if we’re talking about a smaller company.”

He continues: “Fraudulent techniques and AI can cause long-lasting reputational damage to everyone. A company can become toxic, and you won’t be able to clean up the internet. You also won’t be able to remove that data from training sets of AI models, unless you obtain a court order to remove the models themselves. But even then, you cannot remove the data from the training set.”

The impact on a smaller business is the telling factor here: facing a nation-state assault, whether it be a cyber-attack or misinformation, can have huge consequences. The response should include legal and marketing involvement, but even by the time of the attack, recovery may be too difficult.

While the use of AI to manipulate images is not at the heart of this issue, it is certainly making it easier – and the “feeding” of GenAI tools with data could cause problems for businesses trying to clear the claims. Having a response plan is crucial, as well as an eye on what others are saying about you.