Thanks for the info. One semi-related “topic” note on Google. For some reason with topics published by Google Publisher, in order to display an accompanying image, they insist on an image embedded in the copy, not the feature image.
https://news.google.com/publications/CAAqBwgKMOvImwswr9OzAw?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
They refuse to use the OG image.
What ends up happening is for sidebars and collections we need to have feature images (OG) but if a google published topic and want images, then we need to add an additional inline 500px image. So much for faster loading…