Google announced on Friday that they finally natively support AVIF image file types for Google Search, Google Images and anywhere Google Search uses images, such as Google News, Google Discover and more.
We knew this was coming, John Mueller of Google told us in March it was coming soon and now it is here.
John wrote on the Google blog, “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,” he added.
Google also added it to the supported indexable file types search developer documents.
John wrote, “Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web.” He added:
AVIF is an open image file format based on the AV1 video compression standard. It’s supported by all major web browsers, and images in AVIF image file format are supported by a variety of services and platforms on the web, including WordPress, Joomla, and CloudFlare. It’s not recommended to blindly make sweeping changes to images across a website: take the time you need to evaluate which format works best for your specific needs. If you do choose to change image file formats for some of your images, and if this results in changes to filenames or extensions, make sure to set up server-side redirects.
I am not sure if you should just change your image file types just to use AVIF now, Google Images is super slow to handle these changes. Do it for users and Google will catch up, but don’t just do it for Google Search.
There is no specific ranking benefit to using AVIF files… John Mueller of Google said on LinkedIn that there is no “SEO boost” for using AVIF files.
