Google Knowledgebox Using My Images

[stever]

Google's Knowledgebox is, for certain phrases and words, using some of my images to illustrate the topic. If you click on the image it has the same effect as clicking on the image in image search, e.g. it shows the image and does not go to the site.

My initial thoughts on this:

i) it means that the search rankings CTR (impressions versus clicks) is pretty appalling for that site in Google Search Console but it does not seem to have had any negative effect on the site overall (if I was pushed, I would say on the contrary).
ii) the images are watermarked with my website address (meaning I am surprised they are using them) so I guess it is helping with branding the site. (Note: part of the website name could be construed as being connected with images although it is not principally a site concerned with images.)
iii) I guess the site and its content must at the least be considered reputable by Google for their machine-learning to choose those images...

Any other thoughts?

[EditorialGuy]

It really seems like Google is happy to show my images but not to send me traffic.

If you aren't getting any traffic from Google's display of your images, why not simply block Google from crawling and indexing those images? It'll take only a minute or two, and you'll have nothing to lose.

If you are getting traffic from Google image search, that's another story.

[keyplyr]

I get quite a lot of traffic from Google Image Search, but in my experience they are not quality visitors. They don't buy products nor click on ads. With a few exceptions, they are just after more images.

[MrSavage]

All the people who click on ads or buy products are getting picked off now by that row of shopping ads on the image results page. Diversion. It's the keyword for Google in 2018 and beyond and it's music to the ears of shareholders.

[JS_Harris]

The image link and the text url link in KBs often leads to two different sites. No doubt this confuses people who click on the text link looking for the image and vice versa but check it out.

[glakes]

The image link and the text url link in KBs often leads to two different sites. No doubt this confuses people who click on the text link looking for the image and vice versa but check it out.

Google was displaying one of our Chinese competitors product images and using text/linking to our page. Confusion is one thing, but I see it as damaging to brands when it comes to product queries. Regardless, I want no part of the knowledge box. Since Google likes Amazon so much, they should just link to the product page on Amazon, though Google would have to overlook all the typos.

[NickMNS]

It really seems like Google is happy to show my images but not to send me traffic.

If you aren't getting any traffic from Google's display of your images, why not simply block Google from crawling and indexing those images?

Absolutely true, but the issue is not that Google isn't sending any traffic. I get some traffic, maybe <5% of my total. The issue is that the CTR of image search is abysmal. My images are appearing a lot in search. I get 3X more impressions for images then for web pages and the number of impressions is growing steadily, but I get about 1/20th the traffic (clicks from search).

I have been on the fence about this for a while, I have seriously considered preventing my images from appearing in image search (hot linking in general) but 5% is still 5% more traffic then I would get without the images. I'm also afraid that image blocking will further reduce the regular web traffic as well. So I live with it, reluctantly.

Is there a way through GSC or GA to see if your site is appearing in knowledge graph?

[justpassing]

Not to forget that people using Image Search, are searching for images. So it's not surprising that most of them are not clicking to visit the page / site from which the image comes from.