Set up which images show in the Winnow search results

Showing the right images in your search results will help your visitors find your content faster and can lead to a better emotional connection with your site.

Page images are chosen from a prioritized list of candidates. Our crawler first looks for prominent page or product images, then the page’s Open Graph image, then other images in the page body. Author avatars and known placeholder images are skipped.

Search result thumbnails work best when each page has a clear Open Graph image. Add an og:image meta tag, ideally with og:type set to article or website, plus og:image:width and og:image:height when available. If no Open Graph image is available, the crawler falls back to images found in the page body and uses the first valid, reachable image it can use. Avoid letting logos, avatars, placeholder images, or decorative images be the main page image. Use helpful alt text and make sure image URLs are publicly accessible.

On WordPress

Set a Featured Image for each important page or post. Most WordPress themes and SEO plugins use the Featured Image as the page’s Open Graph image, which is the most reliable way for Winnow to choose the right thumbnail. If you use Yoast, Rank Math, or a similar plugin, check that social sharing metadata is enabled and that the intended image appears as og:image. For pages built in Gutenberg or a page builder, do not rely only on an inline image in the content. Prefer setting the Featured Image or explicit social image so the crawler does not accidentally choose a logo, author photo, or unrelated first image.

Further Support

Still can't quite get it to work? No worries! Reach out anytime to hello@winnow-sear.ch. We are here to help.