Google announced that you can now use markup and metadata to tell Google about the image licensing rights and details. When you add this metadata and when Google decides to show the results in image search, Google may show a new Licensable badge for the image. I also covered this last week at Search Engine Land.
Here is a screen shot of what this may look like in Google Image Search:
Note: This is a BETA release, so this may change, never launch fully or look completely different when it goes live.
There are two ways to add this metadata to your images:
(1) Structured data: Structured data is an association between the image and the page where it appears with the mark up. You need to add structured data for every instance an image is used, even if it's the same image. You can learn more about the structured data method there.
(2) IPTC photo metadata: IPTC photo metadata is embedded into the image itself, and the image and metadata can move from page to page while still staying intact. You only need to embed IPTC photo metadata once per image. You can learn more about the IPTC photo metadata method there.
The goal with this is to help those who license images make it clear on how others can use the image:
It's about letting site owners highlight licensing information.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 20, 2020
And this does not help you rank better:
No, this is not about SEO / ranking. The linked developer documentation has more information.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 20, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
