Search surfaces
Multimodal Search
Searching with more than one input type at once — such as an image plus text.
Multimodal search lets a user search with more than one type of input at once — for example, a photo plus a text question, or voice plus an image. Modern models can read images, screenshots, audio and text together, so the query is no longer limited to typed words.
For most B2B content the direct impact is modest today, but it raises the value of describing visual and structured content in text and markup: alt text, captions, labelled diagrams and transcripts give a multimodal engine something to read when the input or the source is not plain prose.
The underlying lesson is consistent with the rest of AEO — the more machine-readable your content is across formats, the more surfaces can retrieve and cite it.
Related terms
Conversational Search
Searching through a natural-language, multi-turn dialogue that carries context.
Machine-Readable Content
Content encoded so software can parse its meaning, not just display its text.
AI Search
Search where an AI reads sources and writes one answer instead of listing links.
Vector Embedding
A list of numbers that encodes meaning so related content sits close in vector space.
Semantic Similarity
How close two pieces of text are in meaning, measured by comparing their embeddings.
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