When you hover over a hyperlink in Google Docs, it shows a small popup with preview information including a thumbnail image and brief description of the linked page.
I noticed that one of our company website pages is showing the wrong thumbnail in this preview popup. Instead of displaying our site logo or a relevant image from the page, it’s pulling some random unrelated image.
Does anyone know what controls which image Google Docs chooses for these link previews? Is there a specific meta tag or markup we need to add to our webpage to make sure the correct image shows up in the preview?
Same thing happened with our corporate site last year. Google Docs pulls from Open Graph meta tags for these previews - mainly the og:image property. No og:image? It’ll grab the first image it finds or pull from cached crawls. Check your page source for and make sure it’s pointing to what you want. Throw in og:title and og:description too while you’re there. Keep the image at least 1200x630 pixels. Google can take a few days to update their cache after changes, so don’t expect instant fixes.
Yeah, this is super annoying. Clearing cache sometimes works, but usually it’s just Google being slow to update. Add a favicon to your site - I’ve seen Google grab that when there aren’t proper og tags. Also check for any AMP version of your page floating around. Google might be pulling from that instead of your main site.
Had the same issue with a client’s landing page. Check for conflicting Twitter Card meta tags beyond the Open Graph stuff Tom mentioned - Google sometimes pulls from those instead. Also verify your image isn’t blocked by robots.txt or has permission issues. I’ve seen cases where the image was fine but the server threw 403 errors at crawlers. Image file size matters too - if your og:image is huge or slow to load, Google defaults to something else. Test what Google actually sees with their Rich Results tool. It’s meant for search snippets but usually shows the same data Google Docs uses.