Why it matters
Google's documented ways to keep a site's images out of search results are a robots.txt disallow (for example for Googlebot-Image) or a noindex X-Robots-Tag header, with the Removals tool for emergencies. A CSS background image, suggested on stage, only avoids extraction from that page; the same image URL used in an img element elsewhere or listed in a sitemap can still be indexed.
How to meet it
Disallow the image paths for Googlebot-Image, or send X-Robots-Tag: noindex for them, but not both for the same URLs, because the header is not seen on a disallowed URL.
How to test it
Google's open-source robots.txt parser (github.com/google/robotstxt), run with the Googlebot-Image token, returns disallowed for the image paths, or curl -I on an image shows the X-Robots-Tag header; after recrawl the images no longer appear in Google Images.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents01
Claims in the knowledge base05
- D2-C529SourceUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosGoogle's documentation
- D2-C530n/aUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosThe author's interpretation
- D2-C826UndocumentedUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosSaid on stage
- D2-C931ConfirmedUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosSaid on stage
- D2-C932ConfirmedUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosSaid on stage
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Confirmed
- Google's documentation states the same thing.
- Undocumented
- Said or shown at the event, not in the documentation.
- Source
- The claim is the cited document itself.
- n/a
- Nothing to verify: a quotation, framing, opinion or analysis.