Alt text describes an image to people using screen readers and to search engines that cannot see it. It is required for accessibility, it is one of the few genuinely uncontested on-page SEO wins, and on most established sites a large share of images do not have it.
<img src="divider.svg" alt="">Worth knowing: Alt text is not the caption, the title or the file name. The caption is visible to everyone; the title attribute is largely ignored by assistive technology; the file name matters far less than either. Only the alt attribute is read in place of the image.
SEO plugins such as Yoast and Rank Math flag missing alt text as part of their content analysis, and dedicated accessibility plugins scan the whole library at once. Some will auto-generate alt text from the file name, which is usually worse than nothing — a screen reader announcing “IMG 4021 final v2” is noise.
There is no native bulk alt-text editor, which is why missing alt text accumulates for years. Describing the job covers the whole library at once.
“Add alt text to every image in the blog that is missing it, describing what is actually in each image.”
+ 43 images scanned, 18 missing alt text
+ “team-offsite-2026.jpg” → “Six colleagues seated around a whiteboard mid-discussion”
+ “pricing-chart.png” → “Bar chart comparing the three plan tiers by monthly cost”
+ 16 more updated — all changes reversible from the activity log
Alt text is written per image and logged individually, so a description you disagree with can be reverted on its own without touching the other 40. How undo works.
Missing alt text is the most common accessibility failure across a portfolio, and it accumulates on every site independently. Auditing and filling it site by site is hours of work; run as one instruction across the fleet it is a scheduled routine that reports what it changed.
Related: AI SEO for WordPress · Image weight and page speed
Alt text is a short written description attached to an image, stored in the image's alt attribute. Screen readers announce it in place of the image, browsers display it if the image fails to load, and search engines use it to understand what the image shows.
Usually one clear sentence. Long enough to convey what matters about the image in context, short enough that hearing it read aloud is not tedious. If an image genuinely needs a paragraph, the information probably belongs in the page text instead.
Only where they describe the image accurately. Alt text exists for people who cannot see the image, and stuffing it with keywords degrades that experience while risking a spam signal. Describe the image honestly; if the keyword genuinely fits, it will appear naturally.
Yes, modestly and reliably. It is a direct ranking factor for image search and gives search engines context about the page. It is also one of the few optimisations with no downside, since the accessibility benefit is real regardless of how search engines weight it.
No — they need an explicitly empty alt attribute. An image conveying no information should have alt="" so assistive technology skips it. Omitting the attribute entirely is different and worse, because some screen readers then read the file name aloud.
Audit the whole media library, write descriptions that describe the image, and reverse any of them individually.
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