Google Adds a Google Lens Button to Its Homepage Search Box

Google rarely changes its desktop homepage, but in early November 2022, it did.

Google added a Google Lens button to the Google homepage, right in the search box. Google Lens lets you search with an image: you upload a photo to Google Search, and Google matches it with visually similar results.

On mobile, Google had offered a Google Lens button for some time already. What’s new is that it now appears on the Google.com homepage as well.

Rajan Patel, Google’s vice president of engineering, shared the news on Twitter. He noted that the Google homepage doesn’t change very often, and that Google is always working to expand the types of questions you can ask and improve how it answers them. Now, he explained, you can easily ask visual questions right from your computer.

Why It Matters

This could lead to more visual searches, and therefore to different kinds of traffic to your images and your content. It fits Google’s broader push toward multimodal search, which it also showcased with its MUM language model.

As Patel said, Google doesn’t change its homepage often, and this time it did. Google Lens is a genuinely impressive search feature that most of us should probably use more.

The bottom line: putting this feature on the Google homepage will clearly matter for your website. It will become more and more important to publish real photos, showcase your past projects, and add visual content to your site to keep up with the growth of visual search.

Where Things Stand in 2026

Visual search has kept growing since then. Google launched Circle to Search on Android in January 2024, and by October 2024 it said Lens was used for nearly 20 billion visual searches every month. Lens is now also built into AI Mode, so people can ask questions about a photo and get an AI-generated answer. Google’s own guide to AI Overviews and AI Mode covers what that means for site owners. Our guide to image SEO for multimodal AI explains how to prepare your images.

Staying Ahead of Google’s Changes

At Référenceur, we keep a close eye on new Google features and factor them into our work to help you rank as well as possible in search engines. Our SEO services include content writing, project showcases, and more, so your site keeps up with what Google expects.

We’d be glad to help with your projects, whether that’s building your website, organic search, paid search campaigns, or managing your social media. Référenceur is a French-speaking digital marketing agency with offices in Belgium and Luxembourg, working with U.S. businesses remotely. Request a free assessment to get started.

This article was inspired by “Google adds a Google lens button to home page search box” on Search Engine Land.