Google Images has become a high-conversion traffic channel: 2026 studies credit it with around 22.6% of total web traffic, and Google Lens processes several billion visual queries a month. A visitor who clicks a product image from Google Images has already seen the product before clicking, more engaged than a typical visitor arriving via a text search.
An image sitemap is an extension of the standard XML sitemap protocol: <image:image>/<image:loc> tags added to each referenced page URL, up to 1000 images per page. On a catalog with a large number of references and variants, a dedicated sitemap beats simple page crawling: Google discovers each image explicitly, rather than depending on how it happens to load in the HTML.
If you already run an SEO plugin like Yoast or RankMath on WordPress, part of the work is likely already done: these plugins often add images to the auto-generated XML sitemap. A dedicated sitemap still helps you keep control over which images to include, avoiding thumbnails or icons with no value for image search.
ImagePipe brings a useful guarantee to this strategy: every image URL it generates is stable and signed, never recomputed for the same size/format combination. You can reference it as-is in an image sitemap without risking a broken link after a redeploy, unlike a poorly configured on-the-fly generation cache, which would change URLs between two sitemap exports and break references Google has already indexed.