Image SEO in 2026: Everything That Changed Since 2019

In 2019 I wrote a guide to image SEO for e-commerce . It did well, it ranked, and by the standards of the time it was good advice. Seven years is an eternity in search. So I went back through the old article, line by line, and audited every claim against how images actually get discovered in 2026. This post is the result: what held up, what quietly died, and what&rsquo;s genuinely new.