Images not indexed by Google: why your pictures are missing from image search

Establish what is and is not indexed

• In Google Images, search site:example.com. This shows a sample of indexed images from your site. Add a word from a specific image's alt text or filename to look for it.
• In Search Console's Performance report, change Search type to Image. Impressions here mean some images are indexed and being shown; a flat zero on a site with many images suggests a site-wide block.

Pick two or three images that should be indexed and are not, and run the checks below on those.

Check 1: is the image in an img element with a real src?

curl -s https://example.com/blue-mug/ | grep -io '<img[^>]*>' | head

Google's image documentation is explicit that it finds images in the src attribute of <img> elements, including those inside <picture>, and does not index CSS background images.

Fails you may see:

• The image is not in the output at all. It is a background-image in CSS, or inserted by JavaScript after load. Decorative backgrounds do not need indexing. A product or article image does: put it in an <img> element.
• src is a placeholder. src="data:image/gif;base64,…" or a tiny blank file, with the real URL in data-src or data-lazy. Script-based lazy loaders do this. Google may not run the swap. Prefer native lazy loading, loading="lazy" with the real src, which WordPress applies by default. If you keep a lazy-load plugin, enable its <noscript> fallback and exclude key images.
• The image is in an iframe or a third-party widget. It belongs to that source, not your page.

Check 2: can Googlebot fetch the file?

Take the image URL from the src and test it:

curl -sI -A "Googlebot-Image/1.0" "https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/blue-mug.jpg" | head -n 5

You want 200 and an image content type.

• robots.txt. A rule such as Disallow: /wp-content/ or Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/ blocks every upload. If images are served from a CDN hostname, that host's robots.txt applies. Paste the file and the image URL into our robots.txt tester, choosing Googlebot-Image; Google's image crawler follows rules for its own name, then Googlebot, then *.
• Hotlink protection. Rules that allow image requests only when the referrer is your own site. Googlebot sends none. Allow empty referrers.
• Firewall or CDN bot rules returning 403 for image requests from crawlers; see blocked due to access forbidden (403).
• Signed or expiring URLs. Image addresses with tokens that change on every page load give Google a different URL each time, and the old ones stop working. Use stable URLs.

Check 3: is indexing allowed?

On the page that hosts the image:

curl -s https://example.com/blue-mug/ | grep -io '<meta[^>]*name=.robots.[^>]*>'
curl -sI "https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/blue-mug.jpg" | grep -i x-robots-tag

• noimageindex in the page's robots tag asks search engines not to index the images on that page. In Hydrogen SEO this directive is among the snippet and preview settings on the Robots screen and per post; check it has not been switched on. See snippet and preview controls.
• noindex on the page. Images are indexed in association with a landing page. If the page is excluded, its images generally are too.
• X-Robots-Tag: noindex on the image file itself, from a server rule covering image extensions or the uploads directory.

Check 4: is the format and context usable?

Google lists the formats it indexes: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG and AVIF. Beyond format, images are more likely to be indexed and shown when Google understands them:

• A descriptive alt attribute. Our image alt text checker lists every image in a page's HTML with its alt state. Hydrogen SEO can fill missing alt attributes from a template at render time; see image SEO attributes.
• A meaningful filename, blue-stoneware-mug.jpg over IMG_4821.jpg.
• Relevant text near the image, and a page title that relates to it.
• A reasonably large, sharp file. Thumbnails and icons are seldom shown.

Help discovery with an image sitemap

Listing images in your XML sitemap tells Google about files it might not find quickly, including those loaded late on the page. Hydrogen SEO adds image entries to each URL in its sitemap when Include Images in Sitemap is on, which is set on Hydrogen SEO → Sitemap; see XML sitemaps. A sitemap entry does not override a robots.txt block or a noimageindex; it only aids discovery.

Confirm and wait

After fixing a block, repeat the curl checks: the <img> has a real src, the file returns 200 to an image crawler user agent, and no directive forbids indexing. Run a live test in URL Inspection on the hosting page and look at the screenshot and page resources to confirm the image loaded. Then request indexing for that page. Image indexing generally lags behind page indexing, so check the image search results and the Image search type in the Performance report again after a few weeks, not days.