Google's John Mueller said it is normal for Google Search to take a while to update image thumbnails in its search results with updated images from the website it pulls from. And it can take even longer if the image is still on the page, but was only moved down the page later, even if the image is within the recipe structured data as the primary.
Adam from Inspired Taste has been complaining about this situation for his easy baked apples recipe. He replaced the primary image with a more tastier version a few weeks ago, but Google Search still shows the old one.
He wrote on Bluesky, " A recipe card image is stuck. It won’t update to a new image we give in JSON-LD markup. We’ve waited two weeks & it won’t change."
Here is a screenshot of the top of the page:
Here is what the search results look like, it is using the wrong image:
And yes, the JSON is referencing the new image, not the old one:
John Mueller replied on Bluesky and said, "I'll pass a note on to the team, but in general, this can happen. The image is still very prominent on the page & continues to exist on the site, so it's not unexpected to continue to be picked as a thumbnail."
Yes, if you look at the page, the second image on that page is the image being referenced. It was the primary image at one point, but Inspired Taste updated it to a new one.
Okay, so late Friday, he removed the second image - so we will have to wait a few weeks to see if anything changes:
Hey @rustybrick. To help the Google team troubleshoot and see that this is indeed a major bug, especially for recipe sites going into the holidays, I removed the last tall vertical photo in the article that looked similar but was different to the one Google is currently still… pic.twitter.com/JocDqBMqPR
— Inspired Taste (@inspiredtaste) September 11, 2026
It will be interesting to see how long it takes to get updated, but generally, images update much more slowly than content within Google Search.
As I was publishing this, the image was updated. John responded about the image being updated saying, "I imagine this is just the normal reprocessing that happens in search pipelines," when he was asked if Google pushed some sort of fix. I doubt Google fixed any of this over the weekend, so I do trust this statement.
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
