Understanding Search Console search types

Search Console's performance data is not one undifferentiated stream. The search type filter splits it by the surface a user found you on, and reading the split explains why the numbers for your site differ from a simple "all search" view.

The standard search type filters

In the Performance report, the search type control offers a set of filters. The names map to the different Google surfaces:

• Web search: standard text results on google.com, including the results pages that the common "web" tab shows.
• Image search: results where the user clicked an image result, which reroutes to your page; closely tied to your image SEO setup.
• Video search: results driven by video content, relevant when you publish video markup (see the video sitemap guide).
• Google News: appearances in the Google News app and news.google.com, shown only to news sites that are discoverable there.
• Discover: cards in the Discover feed, which is interest-based and has no query, so queries show as empty there.

The exact labels and availability can vary by property type and data stage, so confirm against what the interface offers for your site.

What each type changes about the data

Filtering by search type is not cosmetic; it changes which rows appear and which columns have meaning.

• Web search is dominated by query and page rows; this is the surface for most search-optimisation work.
• Image search behaviour shows image results as clicks; the queries there often do not match your written copy but do match your image alt and filenames.
• Video search counts appearances from videos with proper markup; without a video sitemap it is often near zero.
• Discover appears as impressions and clicks with no query field, so the traditional query analysis does not apply.
• News data applies to the news surface and follows the Google News content policies.

Read the types together

A compounding view across all search types totals impressions and clicks from every eligible surface. If your site serves strong images, the Image and Discover tiers may dominate impressions, shifting your attention from ranking to media optimisation. If a site is video-driven, the Video tier tells you whether your markup is being recognised. Read the split against the performance report guide so you attribute each trend to the right surface instead of treating a drop in "all search" as a single cause.

The Discover report covers the feed surface in detail, and the indexing basics explain how a page becomes eligible to appear on any of these surfaces at all.