STAT, a search analytics tool shared a graph on Twitter Friday showing that they saw a 10 point lift in the number of search results snippets that include images in the snippets. Now almost 65% of the queries they track show images in snippets in the top 100 results.
Here is their chart:
Here is an example of a snippet with image thumbnails, but there are more types that would qualify:
Eric Hedekar from STAT said "This is a combined chart across all devices and markets that we track. Some regions have a higher rate, some a lower one. This is all types of image thumbnail that we parse (both traditional image carousel and the newer organic ones)."
I checked some other tools that track Google search results features and they do not either track this specific feature or currently do not show a change.
Anecdotal I do not think it changed much but maybe it hasn't rolled out in New York yet?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Note: This story was pre-written and scheduled to be posted now, I am currently offline for a holiday.