Thursday, April 13, 2023
Today, we’re making a change so that video thumbnails only appear next to Google search results when the video is the main content of a page.
This will make it easier for users to understand what to expect when they visit a page.
Previously, we showed video thumbnails in two different ways.
For pages where the video was the main content of the page, it appeared at the beginning of a listing:
This remains unchanged. The other format was for when a video was present on a page but not the main element of a page.
In that case, the thumbnail appeared after a listing:
This second format is going away. In experiments, this change has had minimal impact on overall engagement for publishers.
This change will impact search appearance reported metrics for videos in the performance report in Search Console.
There will be annotations in the video indexing report and the video enhancements report.
To learn more about video indexing best practices, check out the video best practices guide.
For questions, feel free to post in our Search Central help community, where you can join a discussion with like-minded experts.