AI Image Generation

AI Image Generation

ReachSurge generates a professional cover image for every quality-passing article and video conversion using Google's Imagen 4 fast model.

What gets generated

• Cover image (1200×630) — used as the hero / OG / Twitter card image and embedded in the article's JSON-LD schema as the canonical image.

That's it — one image per page. Inline section images and social-square variants are no longer generated by default; they added cost without adding meaningful citation lift, so we cut them in favour of investing the savings in stronger GEO refine quality on the article itself.

How it works

1. Articles — when an AI-generated article passes the quality gate (publishable=true), a cover image is generated from the article title before the page row is inserted. Drafts that fail the quality gate skip the image step entirely so we don't pay for content that won't ship.
2. Video conversions — every successful video-to-blog conversion gets a cover image. There's no quality-gate skip on the video path — if Supadata returned a usable transcript and the AI produced an article, the cover is generated.
3. The image is converted to WebP at 80% quality (under 100KB) via sharp, uploaded to Supabase Storage's generated-images bucket with public read access, and the URL is stored on the page row in schema_markup.coverImageUrl.

On-demand generation

POST /api/images/generate accepts a custom prompt and returns a public URL. Useful if you want to regenerate a cover without re-running the article pipeline.

Cost

$0.02 per image via Imagen 4 fast — the cheapest variant in Google's Imagen-4 line. Quality-gating articles means we only pay for images that actually ship, so the per-published-page image cost is closer to ~$0.014 in practice once you account for drafts that fail the quality bar.

Plan requirements

Available on all paid plans — Starter, Growth, and Enterprise. Demo and free tiers don't reach the article generation pipeline, so they don't generate images either.

FAQ

What format are images generated in? WebP at 80% quality. Optimised for fast loading (under 100KB per image).

Can I use my own images instead? Yes — the AI-generated cover is optional. You can replace it with your own URL by editing the page in the dashboard.

Why no inline images anymore? Cost-benefit. Inline section images doubled our Imagen bill but moved the citation-rate needle by less than 5%. The cover image is what shows in OG previews, RSS feeds, syndication posts, and AI engine search results — that's where the citation lift actually comes from.

Does the cover image affect my page quota? No. Image generation is a side-effect of article/video generation; the page is the billable unit, not the image.

Why don't drafts get an image? A draft hasn't passed the quality gate yet — most never publish. Generating an image for content that won't ship is wasted spend. If you later edit a draft up to publishable quality, you can use the on-demand /api/images/generate endpoint to add a cover.