That SVG has a PNG inside it, and it will not cut
Several online converters produce an SVG that opens, looks right, and contains your original bitmap in an image tag. There is nothing in it for a blade to follow.
What actually happened
SVG is a document format. It can hold paths, which are geometry, and it can hold an <image> element, which is a bitmap in a wrapper. Both are valid SVG. Only one of them is a vector.
A converter that wraps rather than traces is doing almost no work: it base64-encodes your PNG and writes one tag around it. The file has a .svg extension, opens in a browser, and looks exactly like your artwork, because it is your artwork.
How to check in ten seconds
- Open the .svg in a text editor, not in a viewer.
- Search for "<image". If it is there, the file is a wrapper.
- Search for "<path". If there are no paths, there is no geometry.
- Or: zoom to 800% in a browser. Real paths stay sharp. A wrapped bitmap goes blocky.
Why file size gives it away
A traced logo is usually a few kilobytes: a few hundred coordinates. A wrapped PNG is the size of the PNG plus about a third, because base64 costs you 33%. If your 400KB PNG became a 540KB SVG, nothing was traced.
The reverse is also a signal. If a photograph became a 12MB SVG, it was traced, but at a detail setting that produced tens of thousands of tiny contours. That file will open, and it will bring a cutter to its knees.
Why converters do it at all
Tracing is real work. It means quantising colour, finding region boundaries, walking them into contours, fitting curves to the result and simplifying without losing corners. Wrapping is one function call and costs nothing. A free site with server bills has an obvious incentive, and the output passes a glance.
It is also sometimes correct. If you genuinely want a bitmap inside an SVG for the web - a photograph in a layout, say - the wrapper is the right file. It is only a lie when it is sold as vectorisation.
What a real trace gives you that a wrapper cannot
- A cut line. Paths have geometry; an embedded bitmap has none.
- Resolution independence. Scale a traced logo to a van and it stays sharp.
- Editable nodes. You can pull a corner back into shape in any vector editor.
- Colour separation. Each colour is its own layer, which is what multi-layer vinyl and screen printing need.
- A file measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes.
The same trick in other formats
A PDF can contain a single full-page image and still be a PDF. An EPS can wrap a TIFF. An AI file since version 9 is PDF underneath, so it can do the same. In every case the test is the same: open it as text and look for geometry. A print shop asking for "vector artwork" and receiving one of these is the most common version of this problem, and it is why they charge an art fee to redraw it.