Test of Indexation of images in background by Google

In this post, there is a background image. It is the picture of my 3 years old Macbook Pro 2016 which is already dying… The screen is sometimes not usable, and most of the time there is just one line, vertical.

The idea is to check if either of not Google will index an image which is accessible only from a background CSS call.

John Muller, from Google, in 2018:

And as far as I know we don’t use CSS images at all for image search.

Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-image-search-css-25068.html

Let’s see what if it is still true in 2020 with the mobile first passage, chrome evergreen, the interpretation of the JS, etc.

Results of this SEO test in a few days!

Edit: One month after…

The image is still not indexed.
Current conclusion is that background images aren’t indexable by default.