Google has added image generation to AI Overviews. A searcher can type a prompt straight into the AI Overview and get a custom image back, made with Google's Nano Banana model, without leaving the results page. Search Engine Journal reported the change on 14 July 2026. It landed on the 25th anniversary of Google Images, alongside a rebuilt Google Images homepage.
What Google announced
Brad Kellet, Senior Engineering Director for Search, announced both parts.
The first is prompt-based image creation inside AI Overviews. Google's own examples were practical rather than artistic: visualising a room design, or putting options next to each other to compare them. That framing is worth noticing. This is not pitched as a creative toy. It is pitched as a way to answer a shopping question.
The second is the homepage. Google Images has looked like a search box for most of its 25 years. It is now a personalised gallery of image results that update in real time, and signed-in users get their saved collections as tabs on the page.
Where it rolls out, and where it doesn't yet
The two features are not on the same track, which is easy to miss when they're announced together.
Image generation in AI Overviews rolls out over the coming weeks, in English, across every region that already supports image creation in AI Mode. Google didn't publish that region list in the announcement. So for any given market, the honest answer is to look at the SERP rather than assume.
The new homepage is much narrower: desktop only, United States only, English only.
Zero-click moves into images
Most image SEO advice rests on one assumption. If someone wants to see a picture of something, a human had to take that picture, and Google has to send the searcher to wherever it lives. Filenames, alt text, structured data, compression, the quality of the surrounding page. All of it exists to win that referral.
Generation breaks the assumption for a slice of queries. "What would a walnut dining table look like in a small apartment" no longer needs a photographer. Google can draw it. The click that used to land on a furniture retailer's category page now stays on the results page.
It's worth being precise about which slice is exposed, because it isn't all of image search. Queries that a plausible picture can satisfy are exposed. Queries that need a specific real picture are not. Nobody generates their way to the actual room at your hotel, the actual unit in your building, or the actual product that turns up in the box.
What this means for Thai marketers
Separate the news from the strategy, because they run on different clocks.
The news is a U.S. desktop story for the homepage, and an unspecified set of regions for image generation. Nothing in the announcement says anything about Thailand in either direction. Guessing is worse than looking, so run your own commercial image queries and see what comes back.
The strategy question is bigger and doesn't wait for a rollout date. If your image traffic comes from generic visuals, meaning stock-style photos of a service or a category or a concept, that traffic is on borrowed time. A model can produce those on demand and it will get better at it. If your image traffic comes from pictures that work as evidence, it holds up. Property listings, hotel rooms, restaurant interiors, clinic facilities and real product photography all have something a prompt cannot manufacture. They're true.
The practical shift is that image optimisation now sits closer to generative engine optimisation than to classic on-page work. The question stops being "does this image rank" and becomes "does this image, and the page holding it, give the model a reason to cite a source instead of drawing its own". That's the same discipline as AI SEO for text. Be the thing that has to be referenced, not the thing that can be paraphrased.
Worth checking this month
- Which images actually earn clicks. Search Console splits image search out as its own search type, and anything driven by generic visuals is the exposed part of that number.
- Whether your product, property or venue photos are indexable, and whether they sit on pages that identify the business clearly enough to be credited.
- Whether your alt text describes the real specific thing in the frame, or just repeats a keyword. One of those is citable and the other isn't.
FAQ
Is image generation in AI Overviews available in Thailand?
Google didn't say. The announcement ties availability to regions that already support image creation in AI Mode, and doesn't publish that list. Check your own results rather than trusting a secondhand answer.
Does this replace Google Images?
No. The homepage was redesigned, not retired, and image results still rank. The generation feature sits inside AI Overviews, which is a different surface.
Should we stop optimising images?
No, but the goal moves. Ranking a generic picture is worth less when Google can draw a generic picture. Owning the real one is worth more.
The short version
Image search was always the easiest part of an SEO programme to lose and the hardest to defend. This makes it harder. The work that survives is the work tied to real assets, real premises and a business Google can identify. If you want a read on how your visual content holds up now that Google can draw its own, our GEO team can map it.
