Google has confirmed, through a statement from Robby Stein posted on X, that AI-generated cooking illustrations recently spotted inside AI Overviews were a small experiment the company has stopped running. The confirmation settles what searchers and recipe creators saw this month, but it does not settle how many queries were affected or whether the format returns in some other form. Stein’s statement also draws one specific line: the recipe illustrations are not the same feature Google announced in July for user-requested image generation.
SearchEngineOptimization.blog reported yesterday that recipe creator Inspired Taste had posted an example of an AI Overview generating illustrated cooking steps for a spaghetti squash search. Inspired Taste said its own article and recipe video already covered the technique for safely cutting the squash, building flavor with herbs, and cooking it faster in a microwave, and argued the AI Overview was substituting for the grocery purchases, photography, and filming that go into producing that content. The creator also flagged a labeling problem: a searcher could mistake the generated illustrations for artwork made by one of the sites the AI Overview cited.
Stein’s statement, posted on X, reads in full: “This was a small experiment we’re no longer running. FYI this is not the Nano Banana feature we announced in July, which only triggers when users explicitly ask to generate an image.” Google is naming two different things here, and the difference matters for anyone tracking AI Overviews. The Nano Banana feature, announced in July, is opt-in: a user has to directly request an image before Google generates one inside an AI Overview. What Inspired Taste saw was not opt-in. The illustrations appeared automatically inside an AI Overview answering an ordinary recipe search, with no image request from the user at all.
That distinction is the actual news here. An opt-in image tool that only fires on request is a feature decision publishers can plan around. An automatic illustration layer that inserts itself into a standard AI Overview, without a user asking for it, is a different kind of product bet, and it is the one Google says it has now stopped.
Stein’s statement does not say how widely the recipe-illustration experiment ran, how long it had been active before Inspired Taste posted about it, or whether Google intends to bring a similar automatic illustration format back in a different design. Search Engine Roundtable’s report, which carries Stein’s statement in full, does not supply those figures either. Treat the test as paused for this case, not the format as permanently closed.
The timeline itself is worth noting. Inspired Taste posted its complaint on August 13, a Thursday. By August 17, a Monday, Google had a named product leader on the record confirming the test had ended. Four days from a documented, public complaint to an on-record response and a stopped test is a short feedback loop by any measure. It shows that a specific, well-evidenced case, posted publicly and tagged directly at Google staff, is currently one route that produces a response. It does not show that every complaint gets one, and search teams should not treat this outcome as a standing policy.
Search teams working recipe and how-to verticals should keep an eye on AI Overviews for any return of automatic illustrations, since Google has not said the format is retired, only that this particular run of it is over. Documenting specific, verifiable cases in public, the way Inspired Taste did, remains a more reliable escalation path right now than a general complaint about the feature category.
Search Engine Roundtable, written by Barry Schwartz, published August 17, 2026, first reported Google’s statement confirming the AI Overviews recipe-image experiment had ended.
