Does Google parse SVG images as value of the Schema.org 'image' property in JSON-LD?

Question

Structured data markup is a standard way to annotate your content so Google can understand it. However, I am not sure, if Google will accept and parse svg+xml images as a value for the Schema.org image property.

The Structured Data Testing Tool shows no errors:

Snippet:

{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "SoftwareApplication",
  "name": "Our application name",
  "image": "https://my.company/files/images/desktop-icon.svg",
  ...
}

There is a related question, but it does not apply the new application/ld+json format.

Answer 1

I guess there is no reason to assume that Google wouldn’t handle SVGs as value of the image property:

1. Schema.org’s image property expects an image URL (or an ImageObject).

2. SVG is an image format (image/svg+xml).

3. Google does index SVG images.

(Of course, we can never be sure; and things might change always.)

Generally, the syntax shouldn’t matter, as long as it is one of the syntaxes Google supports (currently: Microdata, JSON-LD, and RDFa), and your case is not one of the rare ones where only specific syntaxes are supported.
It would not make sense if Google would, say, support SVG within RDFa but not within JSON-LD.

That said, in the documentation of some (but not all) Rich Snippets, Google recommends the use of ".jpg, .png, or. gif formats". But that that really seems to be a recommendation, not a requirement.