Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Day 2 · Thursday 1 October 2026 · 13:50
Introduced by name by the previous speaker. The author's recording stops partway through the list of video SEO factors; a second attendee recording covers the rest of the talk (video factors, formats, discovery, robots controls, AI-generated images).
Google's slide listed seven key factors for video SEO success: high-quality video content, a dedicated watch page, compelling titles and descriptions, relevant thumbnails, video markup, fast-loading pages and sitemap inclusion.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence slide photo, transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-02
Google's video SEO slide said each video must be on its own dedicated HTML watch page.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence slide photo, transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-02
Google's video SEO slide warned that spending money on a generative AI subscription does not mean AI-generated videos will do well, because engaging, informative, well-produced content is foundational.
“just because you spent money on a genAI subscription, that does not mean you are going to do well with AI generated videos”
Wording checked against the slide or recording
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence slide photo
Including videos in a sitemap helps Google discover all of a site's video content.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence slide photo, transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-04glossary term Video sitemap
Gary Illyes said images and videos drive a large amount of traffic to publishers.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Google extracts images and videos from the page's document object model (DOM), and finds images with a fairly standard HTML parser that looks for img elements.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-01
An image Google has extracted can appear almost anywhere Google shows results, including Discover, image search, web search and AI features, so its potential reach is immense.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-03
Google supports the picture element only because a picture element must contain an img element, and that img element is what Google extracts and passes to its media indexer.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-01
One of the most reliable ways to make sure Google finds an image is to include it in an img element in the HTML; Gary Illyes named image sitemaps as the other method.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirements DEV-IMG-01, DEV-IMG-04
Google does not extract CSS background images.
“we don't support CSS background extraction”
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-01
Gary Illyes suggested a div with a CSS background image as a way to keep an image from being picked up by Google.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-06
Of the attributes the HTML standard defines for the img element, Google uses three and ignores the rest; Gary Illyes named src and alt but not the third.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
The src attribute is the most important img attribute, because without it Google does not know where the image bytes are and cannot index the image.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-01
Gary Illyes ranked the alt attribute below src in importance, while saying alt attributes are still important.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Alt text should describe the image in words for someone who cannot see it.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-02
Google uses the words in an alt attribute to understand the image, may attach them to the image at serving time, and the image can rank for concepts the alt text describes.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-02
The text around an image is critical: Google uses it as context to understand the image and to rank it, so an alt attribute alone is not enough.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-03
Besides img elements, image sitemaps tell Google about images: they are XML sitemaps that list, under a page's loc entry, the locations of the images on that page.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-04
Google supports pretty much all of the most popular image formats on the web.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-05
Gary Illyes said the AVIF image format currently has hiccups and Google may have problems ingesting it, although it should technically be supported.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-05
Use high-quality modern image formats such as WebP for a good balance of quality and compression, and keep image files small so people can enjoy them.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-05
Gary Illyes cited a figure that more than 40% of Southeast Asian shoppers rely on videos to make purchase decisions.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Gary Illyes said over 219 million people in Southeast Asia consume content on or through YouTube daily (the daily scope was heard in two independent recordings but is not verified).
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Gary Illyes said there are over 150 streaming apps in Southeast Asia.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Videos can appear in the main search results, in video-specific result tabs and in Discover (the tab names are unclear in the recording).
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Google has video-specific features, such as key moments and previews, that help users interact with videos more easily.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-03
Google strongly suggests describing a video's metadata with JSON-LD structured data, on top of placing the video in an HTML element on the page.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirements DEV-VID-01, DEV-VID-03
Gary Illyes said a video without a dedicated watch page is not going to be indexed.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-02glossary term Video watch page
Google knows from experiments that when a video's thumbnail is wrong, the share of viewers who drop out at the start of the video is extremely high.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-03
Gary Illyes called a video container in the page's HTML critical: without one, Google treats the page as having no video.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-01
Gary Illyes called the 'fast-loading pages' factor for video SEO a misnomer: what matters is that the video itself loads fast, because people no longer have the patience to wait for videos to load.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-06
Serving videos from a content delivery network (CDN) that loads them faster than the site's own server is a win for video SEO, Gary Illyes said.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-06
Google supports the most popular video file formats on the web.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-06
Google recommends the MP4 container for videos because of its browser and device compatibility.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-06
Encode videos with standard codecs, because some people will not be able to play videos that use unusual ones.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-06
For a video to be discovered it must be embedded prominently, above the fold; Gary Illyes said a video placed below the fold is not going to be indexed.
“If it's not above the fold, then you basically lost the game.”
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-01
Video sitemaps are not critical but good to have, because Google ingests video sitemaps much more often than it can process HTML pages.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-04glossary term Video sitemap
A video sitemap or video feed tells Google which URLs carry videos so it can visit those URLs to double-check; without one, Google has to check every page individually.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-04glossary term Video sitemap
Descriptive text around a video helps Google rank and retrieve the video.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-02
Gary Illyes suggested considering video hosting platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo, because they solved video search years ago.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-06
The more people talk about a site's videos, the more likely Google is to surface them in search results, so videos should be promoted.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Google's media indexer processes the images and videos that feature extraction passes to it and attaches them to the URL of the page that hosts them.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Googlebot-Image and Googlebot-Video are the Google crawlers that fetch images and videos, and robots.txt rules addressed to their user agent tokens control how Google indexes a site's images and videos.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-06glossary term Googlebot-Image and Googlebot-Video
If robots.txt disallows the location of an image or video file, Google does not index that image or video.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirements DEV-IMG-06, DEV-VID-06glossary term Googlebot-Image and Googlebot-Video
Unlike a disallowed web page, whose bare URL can still appear in web results, a video blocked by robots.txt is not shown by its URL, because Google sees no good reason to show a video URL alone.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-06
The noimageindex robots meta tag tells Google not to index the images on the page.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IDX-09glossary term noimageindex
Gary Illyes said noimageindex also affects videos on the page, because Google has to index a video's thumbnail, which is an image.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IDX-09glossary term noimageindex
Setting the max-image-preview robots meta tag to large can make content perform surprisingly well in Discover, Gary Illyes said.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IDX-04
To the frequent question about AI-generated images on a site, Google's answer is that it is up to the site owner.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirements DEV-IMG-08, DEV-SPM-05
Google serves AI-generated images and videos in search results when users are specifically looking for them.
“We will serve users AI-generated images and videos in search results if they are looking for them specifically.”
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
The diffusion models that generate images were built to generate images, not text, so they are typically poor at rendering text inside an image.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-08
Gary Illyes showed a timeline image that Google made with an image generation model in 2025 and deliberately left unfixed as a counterexample: its text was garbled and its years jumped from 1994 to 1995 and back to 1994.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Sites that use AI-generated images or videos should make sure they work for users, check them for hallucinations and regenerate them where needed.
Speaker Gary IllyesEvidence transcript
Used byrequirements DEV-IMG-08, DEV-SPM-05
Google's documented ways to keep a site's images out of search results are a robots.txt disallow rule (for example for Googlebot-Image) or a noindex X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, with the Removals tool for emergencies.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byrequirements DEV-IDX-03, DEV-IMG-06glossary term X-Robots-Tag
Google's image SEO guide calls alt text the most important attribute for providing more metadata about an image, and says Google uses it together with computer vision and the page content to understand the image.
“The most important attribute when it comes to providing more metadata for an image is the alt text”
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-02
Google's image SEO guide lists AVIF among the supported image formats (with BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP and SVG), and Google announced in August 2024 that AVIF files need nothing special to be indexed.
Publisher Google Search Central, Search Central blog (30 August 2024)
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-05
Google's video SEO guide says a video must be embedded on an indexed watch page to be eligible for video features and recommends a dedicated watch page per video where it makes sense for the business; a non-watch page with the video can still appear as a text result or a Google Images result with a video badge.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-02
Google's Video indexing report help says only videos on a watch page are eligible for indexing, and flags 'Cannot determine video position and size' when the player is not on the page at load, for example behind a click-to-play image, asking for the player to load at its real size and position without user interaction.
Publisher Google Search Console Help
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-01glossary term Video watch page
Google's image metadata guide says Google Images supports the IPTC Digital Source Type values for algorithmically created images, such as trainedAlgorithmicMedia, and can show C2PA details in 'About this image', such as whether an image was created or edited with AI tools.
Publisher Google Search Central
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-08
Hiding an image as a CSS background is a fragile way to keep it out of Google: it only stops extraction from that page, so the same image URL used in an img element elsewhere or listed in a sitemap can still be indexed; the documented robots.txt or noindex X-Robots-Tag methods are the reliable route.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-06
Images that should rank need an img element with a real src; hero or product images set as CSS backgrounds are invisible to Google Images and image features, so keep CSS backgrounds for decorative images you do not need indexed.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-01
Give important images a caption or explanatory sentence next to them rather than relying on alt text alone, since Gary Illyes ranked src above alt and called the surrounding text critical for ranking the image.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-03
While the AVIF ingestion hiccup Gary Illyes mentioned lasts, serve AVIF only through source elements inside picture and keep a WebP or JPEG file in the img src, which is the URL Google extracts, even though Google's documentation lists AVIF as supported; then check in Google Images that key images appear.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byrequirement DEV-IMG-05
Give each important video its own watch page where the video is the main content, add VideoObject markup and list the video in a video sitemap; a video buried in a long article lacks the dedicated watch page that Google listed as a key factor.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Used byrequirement DEV-VID-02
Gary Illyes said a video below the fold is not indexed, but Google's video documentation only requires the player to be present at load, at a position and size Google can determine and not hidden behind other elements; to be safe, put the main video of a watch page in the first viewport and load the player without a click-to-play placeholder.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Do not set noimageindex on video watch pages: Gary Illyes said it also stops the video, through its thumbnail, and although the robots meta tag specification mentions only images, the Video indexing report treats a missing or blocked thumbnail as a reason a video is not indexed.
Author Ibrahim Anjro
Gary Illyes said images and videos drive a large amount of traffic to publishers.
An image Google has extracted can appear almost anywhere Google shows results, including Discover, image search, web search and AI features, so its potential reach is immense.
An image Google has extracted can appear almost anywhere Google shows results, including Discover, image search, web search and AI features, so its potential reach is immense.
With one in six AI Mode searches being multimodal, original images with descriptive file names, alt text and captions feed AI answers as well as image search.
Google's media indexer processes the images and videos that feature extraction passes to it and attaches them to the URL of the page that hosts them.
For videos, Google's feature extraction takes the video itself and the data around it, to get a better sense of what happens in the video, and passes them to Google's media indexing engine.
Unlike a disallowed web page, whose bare URL can still appear in web results, a video blocked by robots.txt is not shown by its URL, because Google sees no good reason to show a video URL alone.
Google's Q&A slide said Google does not index the content of pages disallowed in robots.txt, but users will still find the URLs of those pages in Search.
Because not every generated alt text can be checked by hand, a community speaker's safer script adds the page title to the LLM's image description, so the alt text carries the page's intent and not only what the image shows.
The text around an image is critical: Google uses it as context to understand the image and to rank it, so an alt attribute alone is not enough.
Image results shown among web results come from Google's image index and are roughly the same images that Google Images shows for the same query.
An image Google has extracted can appear almost anywhere Google shows results, including Discover, image search, web search and AI features, so its potential reach is immense.
Generative models, including image diffusion models, make things up when they lack information or because of issues in their training.
The diffusion models that generate images were built to generate images, not text, so they are typically poor at rendering text inside an image.
Google's closing slide said to use AI responsibly because AI hallucinates, and, especially when creating content briefs with AI, to make sure not to add to the sea of AI slop already flooding the internet.
Sites that use AI-generated images or videos should make sure they work for users, check them for hallucinations and regenerate them where needed.
Google extracts images and videos from the page's document object model (DOM), and finds images with a fairly standard HTML parser that looks for img elements.
For images, Google's feature extraction takes the img element with its src and other attributes, including inline images, and passes them on to Google's image indexing service.
The text around an image is critical: Google uses it as context to understand the image and to rank it, so an alt attribute alone is not enough.
Ranking signals differ by result type: web pages (text, links, passages), images (resolution, colour, associated text), news (freshness, originality, diversity), local (location, type, rating, reviews, hours) and videos (language, text from speech).
The noimageindex robots meta tag tells Google not to index the images on the page.
The noimageindex rule tells Google not to index any of the images on the page, and John Mueller said he could not see why a site would want that.
Setting the max-image-preview robots meta tag to large can make content perform surprisingly well in Discover, Gary Illyes said.
max-image-preview:large matters mainly in Discover, where it allows a large image that draws people's attention, so the rule can make a page more visible than leaving it out, John Mueller said.
Google's Discover slide recommended large images at least 1,200 px wide, with more than 300,000 total pixels and a 16x9 aspect ratio, enabled by the max-image-preview:large setting.
Setting the max-image-preview robots meta tag to large can make content perform surprisingly well in Discover, Gary Illyes said.