Change a product photo, keep the filename, and Google may not look for six weeks

You reshoot a product. The new photograph is better in every way. You upload it over the old one, keeping the file name because that is the sensible thing to do, and you get on with your day.

Six weeks later somebody asks why the listing still shows the old picture.

That is not a bug and it is not bad luck. It is written down, in a number, in Google’s own documentation — and it is one of the more useful sentences a small seller could read this year.

The short version

• Same file name: up to six weeks. Google says changing the image content while keeping the URL “can take significantly longer (up to 6 weeks) for the system to detect and recrawl the new image”.
• New file name: usually one to three days. A new, unique URL “signals a change to Google and prompts a faster recrawl, typically within 3 days (24-72 hours)”.
• The old image keeps showing in the meantime, deliberately. Nothing goes blank.
• Your product should fill 75% to 90% of the frame — an actual published range, not a vibe.
• Logos, watermarks and prices on the image are banned, not merely discouraged.
• AI-generated images must keep their AI metadata tag — and routine editing strips it.

Where the six weeks comes from

This is the Merchant Center documentation for the image_link attribute — the field that tells Google which photograph to show for a product in Shopping ads and free listings. Under best practices for changing an image on an existing product, it says:

“If you need to change an image of an existing product, it is best to submit a new, unique URL for the new image in your image link [image_link] attribute. This signals a change to Google and prompts a faster recrawl, typically within 3 days (24-72 hours). If you update the image content but keep the same URL, it can take significantly longer (up to 6 weeks) for the system to detect and recrawl the new image.”

Read that again with a seller’s head on. The thing almost everybody does — overwrite the file — is the slow path. The thing almost nobody does — rename it — is roughly twenty times faster.

The mechanism is obvious once stated. A URL Google has already fetched successfully is not interesting; there is no signal that anything behind it has changed. A URL it has never seen is, by definition, new work. You are not speeding Google up. You are telling it there is something to do.

There is a reassuring detail too: during the changeover the product is listed as “Under Review”, and Google says “We will continue to serve the prior image during this period until the new URL is processed.” You do not get a gap where the listing has no picture.

This is the same lesson in a different building

We published something on Saturday that rhymes with this. We asked Google when it had last crawled every page on our own website, and the median page had not been looked at for 24 days. Different system, different index, same underlying fact: you changed something, and the change is not the event — being fetched again is the event.

Everything you publish sits behind that gap. The useful habit is to stop asking “have I updated it?” and start asking “have they fetched it?”, because those are different questions with different answers and only one of them is under your control.

Three other numbers on that page worth having

1. Fill 75% to 90% of the frame. The exact wording is: “Frame your product in the image space so that it takes up no less than 75%, but not more than 90%, of the full image.” That is a best practice rather than a rejection rule, but it is a genuine measurable target, and in our experience most small-business product shots sit well below 75% — a small object marooned in a large white square. Cropping is free.

2. Take everything off the picture. This is the one that actually gets images disapproved, and it is a long list. Prohibited are “Any overlay, for example, watermarks, brand names, logos (unless it’s an inherent part of the product itself)”, barcodes, and retailer names and logos. So are promotional elements — the examples given include calls to action, “free shipping”, price information, “extended warranty”, promotional adjectives such as “best” and “cheap”, and condition or compatibility text such as “new” or “2-piece”. Borders are out too: “Don’t use an image with a border.”

If you have ever had product images rejected and assumed the photography was not good enough, it is worth checking whether the real problem is something you deliberately added. The watermark you put on to stop people stealing the photo is the single most common example.

3. White or transparent — with a catch. The recommendation is to “Use a solid white or transparent background”, and staged or lifestyle images that clearly show the product are explicitly acceptable too. But there is a trap immediately underneath it: “Don’t use a transparent background for images with light colors because they might show with a black background.” (Google’s spelling, kept as written.) A white mug cut out on transparency can end up displayed on black. If your product is pale, use actual white rather than nothing.

The AI requirement almost nobody has met

Buried in the minimum requirements is a rule that did not exist in this form very long ago: “All images created using generative AI must contain metadata indicating that the image was AI generated (for example, the IPTC Digital Source Type trainedAlgorithmicMedia metadata tag).” Google adds: “Don’t remove embedded metadata tags such as the IPTC Digital Source Type property from images created using generative AI tools”. (Updated 10 September 2026: Google copy-edited this sentence some time between 7 and 10 September — it previously read “meta data”, “AI-generated” and “DigitalSourceType TrainedAlgorithmicMedia”. The requirement is unchanged; we have matched the quotation to the live page and confirmed the earlier wording against an archived copy from 8 June 2026.).

The practical problem is not compliance in principle. It is that metadata is fragile. Resizing, cropping, converting formats and screenshotting all routinely strip it. An image that was correctly tagged the moment it left the generator can be silently non-compliant by the time it reaches your feed, purely because it went through an editor on the way.

We have some standing in this one, and it cuts both ways. Every image on this blog is AI-generated and carries a visible badge saying so, because European rules require a disclosure a person can see rather than one buried in a file. Google is asking for the opposite kind of mark: machine-readable, invisible, and easily destroyed by the ordinary business of editing a picture. If you are doing both, you need to keep both, and only one of them survives a careless crop.

What to do on Monday

1. Stop overwriting product images. Give the new file a new name and update the link. One to three days instead of up to six weeks, for no extra work.
2. Look at your main images for anything you added. Watermark, logo, price flash, “SALE”, a border. Take it off the main image; the extras belong in additional images.
3. Check the product actually fills the frame. Somewhere between three-quarters and nine-tenths.
4. If your images are AI-generated, check the metadata survived your editing — and keep the visible disclosure regardless, because that is a different rule for a different reason.
5. Check your robots.txt is not blocking the crawler. Google specifically asks that Googlebot and Googlebot-image be allowed to reach your product images, and notes that changes take 24 to 48 hours to take effect.

What argues the other way

This is the Google product feed, not the whole internet. Everything above governs images submitted to Merchant Center for Shopping ads and free listings. It is not a rule about the photographs on your own website, and it is not eBay’s rules or Amazon’s. If you do not have a product feed, the six-week number does not apply to you — though the underlying habit of changing the file name still helps everywhere.

Six weeks is a ceiling, not a schedule. Google’s wording is that it can take that long, not that it will. Yours might update in a fortnight. The point is that the slow path has no floor you can rely on and the fast path is one rename away.

And the watermark advice will annoy some people. If your photography is regularly stolen by other sellers, being told to remove the watermark from your best image feels like being told to leave the door open. That is a real trade-off and we are not going to pretend otherwise — but the rule is the rule, and an image that is disapproved protects nothing.

Sources, and what we checked

• Google Merchant Center Help, “Image link [image_link]” (article 6324350) — fetched raw on 6 September 2026 and read in full. Every quotation above was checked word for word against that fetch, and the page was re-fetched and every quotation re-checked on 7 September before publishing: 28 of 28 still verbatim, and the page unchanged apart from a session identifier in its own navigation. It is the source for the three-day and six-week recrawl figures, the “Under Review” behaviour, the 75%–90% framing range, the prohibited overlays and promotional elements, the border rule, the white-or-transparent recommendation and its light-colour caveat, the generative-AI metadata requirement, and the robots.txt guidance.
• The 500 × 500 pixel minimum from 31 January 2027 is on the same page and we covered it separately in the post on Google’s new image size rule, so it is not repeated here beyond the mention.
• What we could not read: Etsy’s and Amazon’s equivalent requirements. Etsy’s help pages return HTTP 403 to us and Amazon Seller Central returns a sign-in wall, so we have made no claim about either. Where sellers ask us how the platforms compare, that is the honest answer: we can read Google’s and eBay’s, and we cannot read the other two.