Google has started showing AI-generated images inside AI Overviews for recipe queries, according to a report from Search Engine Roundtable. The recipe site Inspired Taste found the feature live this week while updating its own spaghetti squash recipe, producing the first widely circulated example of a capability Google had only previewed a month earlier. The stakes are specific to visual, how-to content: a recipe page competes on its own step photography and demonstration video, and a generated illustration now occupies that exact position inside the AI Overview.
Inspired Taste said the panel is trying to “replace creators” who shop for ingredients, test recipes, shoot the photography, and produce video walkthroughs for a dish. The publisher’s own spaghetti squash post includes a section on safely cutting the vegetable, a step it calls genuinely hazardous, along with herb additions and a faster microwave method. Those are the same steps the AI Overview rendered as illustrations, according to the publisher’s account of the search result.
The substitution is a different kind of problem than the one publishers have argued with Google over text summaries for two years. A quoted sentence inside an AI Overview still points back to the page it came from. A generated image of a cooking step does not point anywhere: it stands in for the photograph itself, the asset that differentiates one recipe page from a dozen competitors covering the same dish.
Inspired Taste also flagged a labeling problem. A searcher scanning the illustrated steps might assume one of the sites cited in the AI Overview produced the artwork, when Google generated it instead. That confusion compounds the traffic question, since a misattributed illustration can make the actual source page look redundant rather than essential to the answer.
Google said a month earlier that it planned to generate visuals inside AI Overviews to help searchers picture their own ideas. Inspired Taste’s example is the first documented instance of that plan appearing against a commercially significant query type, where the underlying pages already carry original photography and video the publisher paid to produce. The gap between an announced feature and its first visible appearance in a live result is where a vertical learns whether the feature behaves as advertised.
The report documents a single case, not a measured rollout. Search Engine Roundtable did not describe how many recipe queries currently trigger generated imagery or how far the feature has spread beyond the example Inspired Taste posted, and no independent measurement of its reach accompanied the report.
Any publisher in a visual, how-to vertical such as recipes has an immediate check to run: search the site’s highest-value queries and see whether the AI Overview now renders generated imagery in place of citing the page’s own photography or video. Google has not described a setting that lets a publisher opt out of that substitution, so the practical move is to document what currently appears before a wider rollout makes the starting point harder to establish.
Barry Schwartz reported the sighting for Search Engine Roundtable between August 14 and August 16, 2026.
