Google has announced that images in AVIF file format will now be eligible to appear in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that emerge from Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically reduce image size and improve Core Web Vitals scores, especially Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting your pages crawled and indexed is the first step to effective SEO. Anything that reduces file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers reach your content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google Crawl Budget Documentation recommends increasing your page loading and rendering speed to avoid receiving “Hostload Exceeded” warnings.
He also says that faster loading times allow Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site crawling efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and the availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests more quickly, we may be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next-generation open-source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats, but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (50% smaller for JPEG).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG, but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (which means smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF.
AVIF vs WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller file size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web use, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need to Know
Is AVIF format supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare already supports AVIF as well.
I haven’t been able to verify whether Bing supports AVIF files at this time and will update this article as soon as I find out.
Current use of the AVIF website stands at 0.2% but now that it is available to display in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will likely become a standard image format because their high compression will help sites perform much better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) found that not all social media platforms support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF, but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads, and WhatsApp do.
AVIF images are automatically indexable by Google
According to Google’s announcement, there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the past few years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the Web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images, and for anywhere that uses images in Google Search. You don’t have to do anything special to get your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Featured image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands