Several Google News publishers missing featured images on some articles, issue escalated

The Google News service is experiencing some problems displaying posts in its feed. Multiple reports indicate that some articles are often shown without featured image, which is a big problem for publishers.

According to reports (1, 2, 3), this problem started about a week ago. Affected publishers report that several of the articles from their websites do not display the featured image.

For the last few weeks we’ve been experiencing a problem around featured images in Google News. About 50% of stories are appearing without a featured image.

The markup schema and image size settings all seem to be correct on our side (and we’ve changed nothing recently in our publishing processes).

What’s really baffling is that if the same article is in two sections of the app, one might have a featured image and the other one won’t.
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Hello, I have a Google News feed for my website for years already and never had this problem. Since last week some of my posts are not displaying images in the Google News feed. Nothing was changed in my website, everything is working. I wonder if there is some relation with the news that Google won’t crawl the posts to the Google News feed anymore via RSS Feed, because my RSS Feed was already configurated to display large images in order to show them in the Google News feed in a perfect way.

Is anyone else having the same problem and found a solution? Or it’s a rollout error?
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The featured image is the one that usually appears as the main one in the search results and in the news feeds. This image is very important to attract the interest of a potential reader.

A Google product expert revealed that the company has had multiple similar reports recently. Therefore, they are aware of the problem of missing images on some articles from Google News feed.

Hi Rafael,

This looks like a bug with Google News. We have got reports from other publishers as well about the same and they have been reported to Google already.

But yeah, it’s happening very frequently right now and that can be annoying to the readers.
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For the moment, affected publishers can only wait for Google to find the solution to the problem as quickly as possible. We will update this article once more news emerges about it.

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