Writing
Alt text and media
It is an accessibility requirement, a search signal and — increasingly — the only way your visual content exists to a language model.
Alt text has always been an accessibility requirement. It is now also the mechanism by which a text-based model perceives your images at all. Missing alt text is the single most common failure in the checks we run, and it takes minutes to fix.
What good alt text says
Describe the content and its function in context. Not the file name, not a keyword list.
| Bad | Better |
|---|---|
alt="" on a meaningful image | alt="Quote screen showing line items and a $2,340 total" |
alt="IMG_4421.jpg" | alt="Technician installing a solar inverter on a brick wall" |
alt="landscaping crm software best" | alt="Fernway job list on a phone, three jobs scheduled for Tuesday" |
Keep it under about 125 characters. Do not start with "Image of" — the software already knows.
Decorative images get an empty alt
If an image adds nothing — a divider, a background flourish — use alt="". That is not a failure, it is the correct answer, and it tells assistive technology to skip it. An image with a missing alt attribute is the problem; an image with a deliberately empty one is fine.
The pieces people forget
- Charts and diagrams. Alt text cannot carry a chart. Put the underlying numbers in a table below it. That table is the thing that gets cited.
- Screenshots containing text. Any text in the image is invisible. Repeat the important parts in the caption or body.
- Infographics. Often the single biggest loss of citable content on a site. If you spent a day on an infographic, spend twenty minutes writing it out as HTML.
- Video. Publish a transcript. Without one, the content does not exist to a text model, and
VideoObjectschema with atranscriptproperty helps. - PDFs. Frequently uncrawled or poorly parsed. If a PDF holds important information, publish an HTML version too.
Images and PDFs are where sites accidentally hide their most valuable, specific content — prices, specifications, comparisons. That is exactly the material a model needs to justify naming you.
Fixing it at scale
Run a crawl with Screaming Frog to list every image missing alt text, then work down by page importance. On WordPress you can bulk-edit in the media library; on Shopify, alt text sits in the product image editor.
Take this to your assistant
Paste it into ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude or Gemini and apply it to your own website.
Nothing is sent anywhere. The text is copied to your clipboard.