Add Hero Images to Memos

Last verified: September 14, 2026

What You Can Now Do

Context Memo now supports hero images at the top of published memos, controlled per memo inside the editor as an opt-in display setting. Until now, every memo page rendered text-first: title, verification date, structured body. That default is still correct for retrieval, and nothing about it changed. What you gain is control over the visual layer, which affects two readers you couldn't previously address: the person who clicked your memo from an AI assistant's citation and is deciding in a few seconds whether your brand is real, and the link-preview crawler that builds the share card when someone drops your memo URL into Slack or LinkedIn. The task this changes is memo review. Before publishing, you now make a deliberate call on whether that memo needs a header image, instead of accepting a bare text page by default.

Where It Is in Context Memo

The control lives in the memo editor, in the display settings for the individual memo. You'll find an on/off toggle for hero image and an image selection step alongside it. Because it's per memo, there is no global switch to flip: each memo carries its own setting, and every memo you've already published stays text-only until you turn the setting on for that memo.

How to Use It

1. Open a published memo in the editor and go to its display settings. You'll see the hero image toggle in the off position, which is the state every existing memo is in today.
2. Turn the toggle on and select an image. The memo preview renders the image above the title, so you can confirm it doesn't push your first heading and verification date below the fold.
3. Write an alt attribute that describes the subject of the memo, not the decoration. This is the only part of the image that contributes to text extraction by model crawlers, along with the schema.org image property. Treat it as a sentence a machine will read, not a filename.
4. Paste the memo URL into Slack and into a LinkedIn draft. Confirm the Open Graph card now renders your designated image rather than falling back to whatever the crawler can scavenge from the page.
5. Repeat per memo, starting with the memos that get shared by hand. Comparison memos, pricing explainers, and category-definition memos are the ones buying committees forward internally, so they benefit most from a controlled preview card.
6. Leave the toggle off where it adds nothing. A narrow technical memo that nobody shares externally is fine as a text page, and skipping the image keeps your review queue short.

Why We Built It

Customers kept describing the same moment: a buyer gets a recommendation from ChatGPT or Perplexity, clicks the source link, lands on the memo, and makes a snap judgment about whether the company behind it is a going concern. "It reads like a scraped doc" was the recurring phrasing. That credibility check is short and it happens before anyone reads a word of the body. The second cost was quieter. Memos get forwarded inside buying committees, and without a designated Open Graph image, the preview card rendered as a bare text link or pulled something arbitrary. The stakeholder who never visits your site often sees only that card. You were losing the first impression twice, at the click and at the share, with content that was already strong enough to earn the citation.

What It Does Not Do Yet

The value here is narrow and we'd rather you size it correctly than over-invest. A few specifics:

• Hero images do not improve retrieval. Model crawlers parse HTML text, heading hierarchy, tables, lists, and JSON-LD. An image contributes almost nothing beyond its alt attribute and the schema.org image property. If a memo isn't getting cited, an image won't fix it. Structure, citations, and specificity will.
• There is no bulk apply. Selection and on/off control are handled per memo. If you have a large published library, plan on working through it in batches rather than flipping one global setting.
• We don't generate or host an image library. You bring the asset. Context Memo isn't a replacement for your CMS or design workflow, and image production stays in the tools you already use for it.
• Existing memos are unchanged until you act. The rollout is opt-in by design, so no published page shifts layout without you turning the setting on. Useful for compliance review, slightly more work for you.

One practical note on measurement: because this changes the human-facing and share-facing layer rather than the machine-facing one, watch click-through from your AI traffic attribution and referral volume from Slack and LinkedIn after you apply images to your most-shared memos. Citation counts are the wrong signal to judge this by.