In one sentence: Multimodal search is search that accepts something other than typed text as the question, such as a photo, a screenshot, or a spoken sentence, on its own or combined with words, and returns one set of results for the whole request.
A homeowner sees a wet ring spreading across her ceiling. She does not know the word for whatever failed up there, so she cannot type a useful search. She photographs it and asks who fixes this. That is a multimodal search: the image carries the part of the question she has no vocabulary for, and her words carry the rest.
Underneath, the picture gets converted into something the system can compare against everything else it knows, in the same way a sentence is. Feature names and buttons change constantly. The durable part is simple. A camera is an input to search now, a voice is too, and either can be combined with typing in a single request.
It is also why the questions arriving on your phone got more specific. Somebody photographed the label on a twelve-year-old water heater, asked whether it is worth replacing, and is now calling you with the model number already in hand.
The words do not disappear in these searches. Usually the picture narrows the subject and the typing or the talking carries the rest of it: near me, tonight, how much, is this even repairable. A photograph on its own rarely says who somebody wants to hire.
For a local business the change is in what a photo is for. A picture on a service page used to be there to keep the page from looking empty. Now it is also something that can be matched against.
That rewards specific, real photographs of your own work: the actual failure people call you about, shot plainly, in decent light, close enough to see what it is. It rewards alt text that describes what is in the frame instead of stuffing a service phrase into it, and file names that say what the image shows. It leaves nothing to match in the two habits that are everywhere, which are stock photos of somebody else's job and one hero shot repeated across twenty pages.
Two things travel alongside the picture. The page around it still has to say in plain text what the work is, where you do it, and who you are, because that is what decides whether you are a match for the person holding the phone. And your site is not the only place your photos live. The ones on your business listing are doing the same work, so the set a stranger meets first is not always the set on your home page.
Be honest about measurement, though. You generally cannot see in your analytics that a visit started with a camera rather than a keyboard, so treat this as a reason to keep decent photo habits, not as a channel with a number attached to it. What to photograph, and where those images earn the most for a service business, is covered on the local SEO hub.
Voice search is the audio side of the same idea. Alt text is the written description that tells any machine, and any person using a screen reader, what a photo actually shows. Vector embeddings are the shared numerical form that lets a picture and a sentence be compared to each other at all.
No. What matters is having real photographs of the work, described accurately, on a page about that work. There is no file format, plugin, or setting that substitutes for photos of your own jobs.
Every meaningful photo, yes, written as a description of the photo itself. Purely decorative graphics can carry empty alt text so screen readers skip past them. If you catch yourself writing the same alt text on ten images, that is a sign the photos are interchangeable, which is the real problem.
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