An MMR system includes an analytics module for monitoring and analyzing the creation and usage of visual content search. The analytics module is part of a MMR gateway and provides a mechanism for administrators to determine the usage patterns and other information about users of the MMR system. This information is fed back to other components of the MMR system to improve its operation. The analytics module comprises a monitoring module, a usage database, an access analysis module and a presentation module. The monitoring module is coupled to other components of the MMR gateway and collects information about retrieval request, image queries, context information and recognition results. The usage database stores the information collected by the monitoring module. The access analysis module performs queries on the usage database and analyzes the results. The output of the access analysis module is provided to the presentation module for presentation or output to other systems and users.