Featured Image
A featured image is the primary image associated with a page or post, used in listings, social previews and sometimes in search results themselves. It affects click-through from every surface where your content appears, not only from the search results.
Why it matters for your rankings
Featured images do more work than their SEO weight suggests. They appear in your own category listings, in social shares, in messaging app previews and in Discover, each of which is a click-through decision.
For Google Discover in particular, image quality is close to a prerequisite. Google recommends large, high-quality images, and content without them rarely surfaces there at all. The performance cost needs managing though, since the featured image is frequently the Largest Contentful Paint element on article templates. Serving it uncompressed at full resolution is one of the most common causes of a failing Core Web Vitals score on otherwise well-built sites.
How to check it on your site
Check the LCP element on article pages
If the featured image is being measured, compress it and preload it rather than lazy-loading it.
Set Open Graph image explicitly
Do not rely on platforms picking the right image. Declare og:image at 1200 by 630 pixels.
Use descriptive filenames and alt text
Both help image search and accessibility at no additional cost, and a descriptive filename is read by engines before the image itself is processed.
Verify aspect ratios across templates
Images cropped differently in listings, social previews and article headers need testing in each context.