Supporting AVIF in Google Search

Friday, August 30, 2024

Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. 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.

Googlebot and Crawley checking to see if they are AVIF compatible

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.

If you're curious about other aspects involved with optimizing SEO for your site's images, check out our guide to Image SEO. If you have more questions, let us know in the Search Central help community.