AVIF image format supported in Google Search

What changed

Google announced support for the AVIF format across Search, meaning AVIF files could be crawled, indexed and shown in Google Images and other image surfaces. AVIF offers substantially better compression than JPEG and WebP, so the change removed a practical barrier to adopting it for sites concerned about image search visibility and Core Web Vitals. Only the month of announcement is documented here.

Timing

Rollout began 1 August 2024. No completion date was announced. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.

What it affected