Ha, I tried to download a gif the other day and couldn't get one from Google or Giphy - they're all webp files that masquerade as gif (eg by having .gif URL ending but being a webp).
I noticed this happening with Google Image search the other day, too: image previews are base64 strings, and then sites will use URLs like https://some.site/image/abc123-GUID?format=jpeg for the source image on the site itself.
Hotlinking is endangered. Silently.