Google Maps -> Listings Box -> Listing Image

[cjonesmn]

I'm hoping someone can help on this. If you click on the map listings on the SERP, you can then click to display all listing for that specific search (see below). What I'm wondering about are the images that are displayed alongside each listing. I have three questions:

• Why do some have an image, but not others?
• How does Google determine what image to display for each listing?
• Are they only used for certain types of business categories?

 

[heckler]

• Why do some have an image, but not others?
  My experience has been that to get an image pulled you have to have a domain attached to the listing and it needs to be verified.
• How does Google determine what image to display for each listing?
  This is the million dollar question. Sometimes they simply pull a (seemingly) random image from the website, other times I've seen random images pulled from citation sources with photos (sometimes user generated/added)
• Are they only used for certain types of business categories?
  I've seen this across every segment I've ever worked with.

Hope this helps.