What Google has actually said about Google Lens search volume

Google is one of the few sources that can actually say how much visual search happens, because Lens sits inside Search and Google controls the count. It has shared that number in public several times since 2021, and the figures line up into a real growth curve - but a lot of what circulates as “Google Lens statistics” online is not that curve. It is invented precision from aggregator sites, and this piece draws the line between the two.

What Google itself has said, in order#

Google’s product blog said in June 2021 that Lens was being used “over three billion times per month,” a figure widely reported at the time as roughly a 4x increase from the prior year. By June 14, 2023, Google’s own blog post “8 ways Google Lens can help make your life easier” put the number at “more than 12 billion visual searches on Lens” every month - itself described elsewhere by Google as a 4x increase in the two years since. On October 3, 2024, a Google Search blog post titled “Ask questions in new ways with AI in Search” raised that figure again: “Google Lens is now used for nearly 20 billion visual searches every month.” That is roughly a 67% increase over the prior disclosure, in about sixteen months.

Google changed how it reported the metric at its I/O 2025 keynote on May 20, 2025. Sundar Pichai told the audience that Lens “grew 65% year over year, with more than 100 billion visual searches already this year” - a cumulative, year-to-date figure rather than a monthly rate, reported by outlets including TechCrunch since no blog.google post repeats the line verbatim. The same week, Google’s own “AI Mode in Google Search” blog post cited a related but different number: “more than 1.5 billion people are using [Lens] to search what they see every month,” a count of monthly users rather than monthly searches. Read together, the three 2023-2025 data points show real, sustained growth; the two 2025 figures show Google shifting toward growth-rate and user-count framing rather than repeating a single monthly-search number.

What we could not verify, and left out#

Two claims recur across dozens of SEO-statistics roundup pages: that “Google Images drives 22% of all web searches” and that “image-based searches represent 26% of all Google queries.” Neither traces to blog.google, a Google executive quote, a named study or any dated source. One version of the 26% claim even attaches itself to a distorted restatement of Google’s own Lens numbers - citing “20 billion visual searches per month as of March 2026, a 43% increase from 14 billion in 2024” - which contradicts the dated figures above (12 billion in mid-2023, not 14 billion in 2024) and appears to be an aggregator’s guess dressed up as precision. Per this site’s sourcing rule, both the 22% and the 26% figures are excluded rather than repeated.

Why we care#

The verified numbers still tell a clear story: Google has never reported a decline in Lens usage, and every dated disclosure from 2021 through 2025 points the same direction. That is reason enough to treat product imagery and on-page images as a ranking surface in their own right, not an afterthought. Descriptive file names, specific alt text and structured product data are what Lens and Google’s other image-matching systems have to work with when they decide what a photo shows and what page to attach it to - the same signals that matter for regular image search matter here too. What this report cannot tell you is how much of your own traffic comes through Lens specifically, because Google has never broken out that channel in Search Console; until it does, treat visual-search readiness as good image-SEO practice rather than a metric you can track in isolation.