Image alt text auditor
Paste a URL, get every image on the page with its alt text status — good, empty, missing, or decorative.
Paste any URL above to scan every <img> on the page for alt-text coverage.
Why image alt text still matters
Two reasons: accessibility and image search. Screen readers rely on alt text to describe images to blind users; without it, images are invisible to them. And Google's image search ranks pages partly on whether your alt text matches the searcher's query — a hero image with the right alt is the difference between showing up in image results and not.
AI Search adds a third reason. LLMs that crawl your site read alt text the same way Google does: as authoritative signal about what the image conveys. Pages with thorough alt coverage get more accurately summarized when an LLM cites them.
The four statuses this audit reports
- Good — the image has descriptive alt text. This is what every meaningful image should have.
- Decorative — the image has
alt="". This is spec-correct for decorative images (background shapes, divider patterns, purely-aesthetic icons). Screen readers skip these — exactly the right behavior. - Empty — the alt attribute exists but contains only whitespace. Broken: it neither describes the image nor explicitly opts out of announcement. Screen readers may read “image” out loud, which is worse than nothing.
- Missing — no alt attribute at all. Screen readers fall back to reading the filename, which is rarely useful (“hero underscore final v three dot j p g”).
How to write good alt text
- Describe the image, not the surrounding context. Bad: “Image about marketing”. Good: “A team in a glass meeting room reviewing a marketing dashboard on a wall-mounted screen”.
- Keep it under ~125 characters. Most screen readers truncate around there.
- Don't start with “Image of…” Screen readers already announce that it's an image. The redundancy is annoying.
- For purely decorative images, use
alt=""— not “decorative”, not blank space, not nothing. The empty quoted attribute is the right answer. - For complex images (charts, diagrams), describe the data. “Bar chart showing organic traffic up 42% YoY, with the largest jump in May 2026” beats “chart showing growth”.
FAQ
Why does decorative count as 'correct'?
Spec-correct accessibility distinguishes between meaningful images (need alt text) and decorative ones (need alt=""). The empty alt is an explicit signal to screen readers: 'don't announce this'. That's the right answer for divider lines, ornamental borders, and pure-aesthetic icons. Counting it as correct rewards proper accessibility hygiene.
What about images loaded by JavaScript?
We can't see them. The audit fetches the raw HTML and parses static <img> tags. Images injected after page load (lazy-loaded gallery thumbnails, dynamic content) won't appear in the report. The full ItzSEO platform's audit runs in a headless browser to catch JS-rendered content.
What's a 'good' alt coverage score?
Above 95% means you're doing this well. Above 80% is where most professionally-managed sites land. Below 70% means you have a systematic problem — usually the CMS isn't requiring alt text on upload, or images were imported without alt.
Should every image have alt text?
Every <img> tag needs an alt attribute. The text inside it depends — meaningful images get descriptive text, decorative images get alt="". The wrong answer is leaving the attribute off entirely.
Does alt text affect SEO?
Yes, but indirectly. It helps Google's image search crawler understand the image, which can drive image-result traffic. It also feeds Google's overall page-quality signal — sites with poor accessibility tend to be penalized in mobile-friendly testing.
Will my URL be saved?
No. We don't log inputs. The audit runs and the URL is discarded.
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