Google is once again investigating issues with recipe images and other images not showing for some sites within the Google Search results. We reported on several issues with recipe sites several weeks ago and it seems to be happening again for some of these sites.
I am not sure if it is related to Google penalizing some recipe sites for improper use of recipe markup or if this is a bug with Google Search.
There are complaints from mostly recipe sites but also from other sites about this issue.
Here is the issue, where a site's recipe image is not showing in the search results:
Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, replied to one of the complaints on X saying, "I have had a few reports of this, so I will pass it on." Yes, I saw several more reports of this, here is another one:
@rustybrick Thumbnails in link serps for food bloggers (presumably other niches also) disappearing again. Have you seen any of this? Happening to me too.
— Courtney Whitmore (@Pizzazzerie) March 20, 2024
There are many other complaints in the Google Webmaster Forums, here is a screenshot from a couple of days ago:
Again, I am not sure if this is a bug or something intentional but I am seeing more complaints about image thumbnails not showing up in the search results again.
Forum discussion at X.
Update: Google did/is looking into it and it seems like they are happy with how things are:
We did pass these on, and folks have been looking into the report, but in general, we don't guarantee that images are shown with search results, so sometimes things are just shown without them.
— John (@JohnMu) March 26, 2024
Like I mentioned, it's not expected that every post / search result has an image next to it. I imagine things would look pretty cluttered if that were the case.
— John (@JohnMu) March 27, 2024
