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— Free SEO tool

Alt text checker

Alt text describes an image for people who can’t see it and for Google. This finds every image on your site that doesn’t have any.

Free tool · Alt text checker

Find images with no alt text

Put in your home page. The checker reads up to 50 pages and lists the images on each that have no alt attribute, by file name.

Pages come from your sitemap, or by following links from the home page if there isn’t one. Results aren’t stored anywhere. Pages built entirely with JavaScript may show as empty, because this reads the HTML your server sends.

01 How it works

What it checks, and why

01

Missing alt attributes

Images with no alt attribute at all. Screen readers may read out the file name instead, and Google has less to go on when deciding what the image shows.

02

Empty alt is allowed

alt="" is the right choice for purely decorative images: it tells screen readers to skip them. Those aren’t flagged, just counted in the CSV.

03

What good alt text says

What the image shows, in the context of the page, in a sentence or less. Not a list of keywords.

Sources: Google: Image SEO best practices · W3C: Alt text decision tree

02 Questions

What people ask

Does alt text help SEO?

Google says it uses alt text, along with the page content, to understand images, and it matters most for appearing in Google Images. It’s also an accessibility requirement.

Should every image have alt text?

Every image needs an alt attribute. Informative images need a description; decorative ones should have an empty one (alt="").

Does it check background images?

No. CSS background images can’t take alt text, so they’re not included. Only <img> elements are checked.

03 More free tools

H1 checkerPages with no main heading, an empty one, or several.Meta description checkerEvery page’s description: missing, duplicated or likely to be cut short.Title tag checkerTitles that are missing, over 70 characters or copied across pages.

All free SEO tools →

— Next step

Start with a free SEO audit

Send me your site and you’ll get a short, honest read on what’s wrong. If you want the detail after that, the full audit is a paid piece of work, or part of a retainer.

Get the free audit Usually a reply within a working day.
  • 01The main things holding your site back, in plain English
  • 02Which of them are worth fixing first
  • 03Whether a full audit or a retainer makes sense, or neither