Google has announced plans to roll out a new referrer URL specific to Google Images over the next dew months.
This update is being introduced as a way to help site owners better understand the extent to which Google Images drives site traffic.
The new Google Images referrer URL is part of the HTTP header, and will indicate the last page a user was on when they clicked to visit the destination web page.
This change will happen automatically, meaning nothing needs to be done on the part of the site owner.
Google Analytics will automatically ingest the new referrer URL and attribute the traffic to Google Images.
There will be no change to how data is recorded in Search Console.
Google emphasizes that software developers, particularly those who create tools to analyze website traffic, need to prepare for the change by ingesting the new referrer URL.
“If you create software to track or analyze website traffic, we want you to be prepared for this change. Make sure that you are ingesting the new referer URL, and attribute the traffic to Google Images. The new referer URL is: https://images.google.com.”
The new referrer URL will have the same country code top level domain (ccTLD) as the URL used for searching on Google Images. For the most part, visitors worldwide usually come from images.google.com.
For more information about Google Image Search, please see the following resources:
