[Updated] Google Search adds support for AVIF images, making the format OK to use in WordPress
WordPress 6.5 added support for the AVIF image format, but Google Search didn't support AVIF. However, on August 30, 2024, Google officially announced support for AVIF images, making the format okay for WordPress sites that want images to appear in Google.
Like Apple with Safari, WordPress held off on adding support for WebP images until it became a commonly used image format several years later.
WordPress mimicked Apple again, but this time did the opposite. They added support for a newer image format, AVIF, well before most image editors like Adobe Photoshop even supported it natively. Even more concerning was that Google Search didn’t support AVIF either.
Fortunately, WordPress sites no longer have to worry about using AVIF images and not having their images appear in Google Search. On August 30, 2024, Google officially announced support for the AVIF image format. In a statement on the Google Search Central Blog, John Mueller wrote:
Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.
The official Google Images documentation was also updated to reflect the change.
Google Search supports images referenced in the src attribute of img in the following file formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, and AVIF. It’s also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.
Google Search finally adds support for AVIF
Google’s longtime lack of AVIF support was confusing because Chrome has supported AVIF for a while, and Google Search uses an evergreen headless version of Chrome to render pages. When you analyzed pages using AVIF images in Google Search Console or Rich Results Test, AVIF images would render perfectly in the screenshots they produced (and still do).
However, while Google could render AVIF images, they didn’t support them. Google had explicitly excluded AVIF in its documented list of supported images.
Google Search supports images in the following formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG.
Google’s lack of support for AVIF kept them from appearing in search results. For example, Google Images wouldn’t index them. It got even worse for videos when the video thumbnail image was in an AVIF format. Before Google analyzes a video, it checks the video thumbnail image. If the image isn’t valid, they won’t analyze the video. That means if the video thumbnail image used the AVIF format, they would abort analyzing and indexing the video.
It’s unknown why Google didn’t support AVIF. It could have been that the AVIF format is more computationally expensive, and Google was trying to save money. But it could have also been that supporting it wasn’t an internal priority. Regardless, they officially support it now, and sites wanting their images to appear in Google Images or have their videos analyzed by Google can start using AVIF images.
Jon Henshaw is the founder of Coywolf and an industry veteran with almost three decades of SEO, digital marketing, and web technologies experience. Follow @jon@henshaw.social