March 20, 2025

There may be some chatter within the website positioning group that Google Picture Search could also be down rating, reducing the rankings, of AI-generated pictures, in favor of non-AI-generated pictures inside the Google Picture search outcomes.

Zack Notes posted about this on LinkedIn and shared some charts exhibiting a drop in picture site visitors from Google Picture Search in late January 2025. He believes that Google Pictures could have added some kind of high quality metric that doesn’t rank AI-generated pictures in addition to it ranks different pictures.

Zack wrote, “The chart under exhibits Net vs Picture for our online game Animal Matchup, and the picture site visitors (which comes from our AI pictures) simply took a giant hit. We’ve not made any site-level adjustments to the pictures, we haven’t any new technical points, and the net site visitors is comparatively regular. This leads me to imagine that Google put a success out on AI pictures.”

Right here is his chart that exhibits the drop in picture site visitors, however net site visitors to his most important content material staying the identical:

Gsc Image Chart1

Afterward, Zack posted an replace saying, “Replace on this…I’ve since acquired DMs from different with AI picture websites. That they had drops on the identical date.” He shared this chart additionally:

Gsc Image Chart2

Kane Jamison replied that he seen this too, saying, “Sure Google has had a number of Google Pictures updates for the reason that fall that look like AI-image associated. I’ve seen a couple of SERPs the place there’s nothing good to switch them, and the pictures I am engaged on are “AI protected” the place it does not impression person in any respect, however I perceive why they need AI pictures out of different picture SERP sorts.”

I’m not seeing a lot chatter on this subject exterior of this LinkedIn thread, so I used to be questioning if any of you’re noticing this.

I can say, I take advantage of AI-generated pictures on this website for nearly all of my hero pictures and I don’t see this drop. Right here is my chart:

Gsc Images Report

What are you all seeing associated to this?

Discussion board dialogue at LinkedIn.