A recipe blogger’s image swap still had not shown up in Google Search after two weeks, and John Mueller says that kind of lag can happen.
Adam of Inspired Taste updated the primary image on his easy baked apples recipe and refreshed the JSON-LD markup to match, but Google’s search result thumbnail kept showing the old photo. He raised the issue on Bluesky, noting the new image was correctly referenced in structured data while the old one stayed on the page, lower down.
Mueller replied that the outdated image was “still very prominent on the page” and continued to exist on the site, so Google’s systems kept selecting it as the thumbnail. He said he would pass a note to the team, but called the outcome not unexpected.
Inspired Taste later removed the older image from the page, and the thumbnail updated a few days after. Asked whether Google had pushed a fix, Mueller said he imagined it was the normal reprocessing that happens in search pipelines.
Sites relying on recipe rich results should confirm outdated images are fully removed from the page, not just replaced in markup, before assuming a thumbnail bug.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the exchange on September 14, 2026.
