Image Alt Text Checker

Enter your page URL to analyze all image alt texts and improve them for better accessibility and SEO.

How does it work?

Poor or missing image alt texts can negatively affect your image SEO and your website’s accessibility. For example, without an image alt text, search engines can’t understand its context, reducing the visibility in image search results. Alternatively, if it’s not concise or informative, it can also get misunderstood by search engines.

Good vs bad image alt text examples

With our free image alt text checker, you can scan your webpage and evaluate the alternative texts associated with your images. It identifies missing image descriptions, flags the ones that are too long, and provides you with actionable recommendations on how you can improve your alt texts.

What is an image alt text?

Image alt text, or alternative text, is a short description of an image’s content. It can be located as a placeholder when an image fails to load or through the Inspect element on your browser. It looks something like this:

html example
<img src="example.jpg" alt="A brown dog and a white cat">

It helps search engines understand the content of your image, boosting SEO and potentially improving image search rankings. Alt texts also help visually impaired users to understand the context of an image through their screen readers, making your website more accessible.

What are the best image alt text practices?

When writing image alt texts, you have to ensure that you don’t just meet the character count but also follow the best practices. Here are the main things to keep in mind:

  • Be brief but descriptive
  • Avoid redundant phrases, like “a picture of”
  • Stay under 125 characters
  • Don’t write alt texts for decorative images
  • Include a target keyword
  • Avoid keyword overstuffing

Questions & answers

An alt text shouldn’t be longer than a sentence. Popular screen readers cut it off after 125 characters. In terms of SEO, Google has stated that they “don't have any guidelines with regards to how long your alt text can be.” What matters is that all the information you put is relevant to the image.
In most website builders, including Shopify and WordPress, you can insert the alt text by opening the media file. However, you can also add the alt attribute in the image’s HTML tag, like: <img src="example.jpg" alt="A red hat on a table">
Search engines use image alt texts to understand your image’s content and how its relevance in the page, helping increase your chances of ranking higher in Google Image Search. Additionally, with Google now using generative AI to create a more comprehensive shopping snapshot, alt texts help the engine determine when to prioritize your images and products as top choices in search results.