Google Images and Discover Don’t Yet Support JPEG XL for Previews

Google Images and Discover don’t yet support JPEG XL for displaying images and previews, Google Search representative John Mueller said on October 15, 2026. As Search Engine Journal reports, the clarification came shortly after the format was added to Chrome and Firefox. For a website, that distinction matters: a browser may be able to open a .jxl file, but that isn’t enough to count on the file appearing in Google image search or recommendations.

Browsers support the format, but Search doesn’t yet

JPEG XL arrived in Chrome 155, which Google began rolling out widely on October 6 after a limited release starting September 23. Firefox added support in version 158 on October 13, while Safari had already added it in version 17 in 2023. Even so, webstatus.dev rates the format’s availability as limited; its tracker does not list an Edge release with support.

According to the Chrome team, JPEG XL delivers 30–50% better compression than JPEG and supports lossless compression and HDR. The developers recommend testing it alongside AVIF and see it as especially useful for photographs where high image fidelity or lossless compression matters. But the format’s capabilities and browser support don’t mean Google uses .jxl files for previews.

Google Search documentation lists the formats supported in the src attribute of an img element: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG and AVIF. JPEG XL is not among them. The same seven formats appear on its list of indexable image types. As of October 20, the Search Central documentation changelog had no announcement that JPEG XL had been added.

How to keep images available to Search and Discover

Mueller explained that JPEG XL can be offered to browsers through a picture element, with a regular img element inside it. That makes .jxl one of the image sources, while the img element’s src can point to a file in a format Google supports, such as JPEG, WebP or AVIF. According to Mueller, this setup should work for search engines: they can read the img element.

That aligns with Google’s documentation: Search can find an image through an img element’s src even when the element sits inside a picture element. Google recommends keeping a fallback URL in src because some browsers and search crawlers don’t support picture or srcset, or cannot read them. This lets you test the new format without making it the only available version of an image.

Discover has separate recommendations for large preview images. A URL can be specified through schema.org markup or an og:image meta tag; these may influence which preview Discover selects. If those URLs point to .jxl files, a fallback img on the page will not replace them on its own. For those URLs, it makes sense to choose a format from the list in the Search documentation.

Mueller gave no timeline for JPEG XL support in Google Images and Discover. AVIF’s history shows that browser and Search support can arrive years apart: Chrome added AVIF in August 2020, and Google announced Search support for it on August 30, 2024. That is not a forecast for JPEG XL, but a reason to follow Search documentation separately from browser releases.

What this means for website owners

If a website relies on Google Images or Discover previews, moving its entire catalog to .jxl alone is premature. Checking how photographs look in Chrome and Firefox does not tell you which image Google can use. When adopting a new format, it’s important to assess both the page and the image URLs supplied for previews.

For a store, this is not an abstract technical distinction. A shopper may first see a product photograph before visiting the site, then compare it with other offers. The choice of format should therefore account not only for image quality and file size, but also for the channels where the store wants its products to appear.

My view: don’t bet everything on one format

I’m moving a home goods store’s catalog from spreadsheets into a CMS, so I see this news as a question of how the catalog is set up, not just page speed. I’m interested in trying JPEG XL for photographs: when shoppers compare small items, details matter. But I wouldn’t want the team to upload the new format for the entire range, only to discover that we no longer have suitable images for the previews we need.

I would build a fallback format into the photography workflow from the start. That way, we can try something new without tying product visibility to a single technical choice. Search isn’t going away: what’s changing is how people first encounter a product and get an answer. For a small store, being able to test a format without losing established channels matters more than the promise of better compression alone.

Sources

Where the news comes from. The text is a retelling in the author’s own words; the facts come from the source, the opinion is the author’s.

1. Google Images & Discover Previews Don’t Support JPEG XL via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern www.searchenginejournal.com
2. JPEG XL Image Format Not Supported By Google Images & Google Discover www.seroundtable.com

About the author

Kostas Markou

Home goods shop owner

I’m growing a small home goods shop in Cyprus and finally moving the catalog from spreadsheets into a proper CMS. I want to connect content, search, and sales so the team can launch ideas without waiting weeks for a developer.

All posts by the author