Multimodal Search

Multimodal search is search that combines text with images, voice, or video within a single query, letting a user, for example, submit a photo alongside a text question rather than describing what they're looking for in words alone, expanding what counts as a searchable input.

Why it matters

Multimodal search extends GEO's optimization surface beyond text alone, meaning image alt text, video transcripts, and other non-text content increasingly need the same clarity and structure that text content requires, since any of them can become the input or the retrieved source for a query.

Related terms

• Conversational Search

  Conversational search is a natural-language search interaction where a user asks a question the way they'd ask a person, and receives one synthesized answer instead of a page of ranked links. It's the interface pattern behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode.

• Agentic Search

  Agentic search happens when an AI agent researches and selects information on a user's behalf: running its own sub-queries, evaluating multiple sources, and delivering a synthesized recommendation, rather than a human directly reading and judging a results page themselves.