Last week, Google began sending new notices via Google Search Console about ways to enhance your images on Google. The notice talks about using the max-image-preview robots meta tag on all search-eligible images on your site.
This max-image-preview is a few years old, as we covered here and it lets you specify a maximum size of image preview to be shown for images on this page, using either "none", "standard", or "large".
The email Google is sending reads:
Google has identified that you have not applied the max-image-preview robots meta tag to all search-eligible images on your site. Without this tag, your images will appear only in thumbnail size on Google (including Google web search, Google Images, Discover, and Assistant).If you would like to enable large image previews on these surfaces for an image, you can do so by applying the following tag once in the head section of the image host page:
meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large
Here is a screenshot I have:
Lily Ray spotted this and posted about it on Twitter, she said "Wonder how many people who have been saying “why am I not getting traffic from Discover” will realize this is the answer."
Forum discussion at Twitter.
