Google’s support for AVIF images in Search will significantly enhance your site’s performance. Now is the time to explore this opportunity.

Google has announced that images in the AVIF file format can now appear in Google Search and Google Images across all platforms that display Google Search data. AVIF images offer dramatically reduced file sizes, which can significantly enhance Core Web Vitals scores, particularly for Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Effective SEO begins with ensuring that your pages are efficiently crawled and indexed. Reducing file sizes and speeding up web page rendering are critical steps in this process, as they help search crawlers access your content more quickly and increase the number of pages that can be crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation emphasizes improving page load and render speeds to avoid “Hostload exceeded” warnings. Faster loading times not only prevent these warnings but also enable Googlebot to crawl more pages on your site:

Improve Your Site’s Crawl Efficiency:

• Increase Page Loading Speed: Google’s crawling is constrained by bandwidth, time, and the availability of Googlebot instances. By optimizing your server’s response time, you can allow Google to crawl more pages, enhancing your site’s overall SEO performance.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next-generation, open-source image format that offers the best features of JPEG, PNG, and GIF while delivering significantly smaller file sizes—up to 50% smaller than JPEG. AVIF supports transparency like PNG and handles photographic images as JPEG does but with enhanced dynamic range, deeper blacks, and superior compression. Additionally, AVIF can even support animations, much like the GIF format.

AVIF Versus WebP

When comparing AVIF to WebP, AVIF generally outperforms in terms of smaller file sizes and higher image quality. While WebP excels in lossless images, where preserving top-tier quality is critical regardless of file size, AVIF is the superior choice for everyday web usage, offering better compression and image quality.

Is AVIF Supported?

Significant browsers, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, currently support AVIF. While not all content management systems (CMS) support AVIF, WordPress and Joomla do. Cloudflare, a prominent content delivery network (CDN), has also integrated AVIF support. It’s still being determined whether Bing supports AVIF files; I will update this article once more information is available.

Currently, only 0.2% of websites use AVIF, but that number is expected to grow with its inclusion in Google Search results. Due to its superior compression, AVIF is likely to become a standard image format, helping websites perform better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast, revealed that not all social media platforms support AVIF files. LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not yet support AVIF, while Facebook, Pinterest, Threads, and WhatsApp do.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable by Google

Google has confirmed that AVIF image files are automatically indexable without additional steps.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the 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 any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

If you’re still confused, consider exploring monthly SEO packages and letting the experts assist you.