There is some chatter in the SEO community that Google Image Search may be down ranking, lowering the rankings, of AI-generated images, in favor of non-AI-generated images within the Google Image search results.
Zack Notes posted about this on LinkedIn and shared some charts showing a drop in image traffic from Google Image Search in late January 2025. He believes that Google Images may have added some sort of quality metric that does not rank AI-generated images as well as it ranks other images.
Zack wrote, "The chart below shows Web vs Image for our video game Animal Matchup, and the image traffic (which comes from our AI images) just took a big hit. We haven't made any site-level changes to the images, we don't have any new technical issues, and the web traffic is relatively steady. This leads me to believe that Google put a hit out on AI images."
Here is his chart that shows the drop in image traffic, but web traffic to his main content staying the same:
Later on, Zack posted an update saying, "Update on this...I've since received DMs from other with AI image sites. They had drops on the same date." He shared this chart also:
Kane Jamison replied that he noticed this too, saying, "Yes Google has had multiple Google Images updates since the fall that appear to be AI-image related. I've seen a few SERPs where there's nothing good to replace them, and the images I'm working on are "AI safe" where it doesn't impact user at all, but I understand why they want AI images out of other image SERP types."
I am not seeing much chatter on this topic outside of this LinkedIn thread, so I was wondering if any of you are noticing this.
I can say, I use AI-generated images on this site for almost all of my hero images and I do not see this drop. Here is my chart:
What are you all seeing related to this?
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
