ALT texts combine SEO, accessibility and editorial quality. This indicator does not describe empty alternative texts; their content quality and the function of decorative images must be assessed separately.
ALT coverage for images: 73 % (Median of domain values) from 60,414 evaluable domain values in the selected segment. The number describes the sample examined, not all websites or all URLs of these domains.
The metric does not count empty ALT texts to img elements. Intentionally empty alternative texts of decorative images also lower this value. It is therefore not a measure of WCAG compliance.
Many images are created in news, references, products or blog posts. The editorial workflow should distinguish between meaningful alternative text for content images and intentionally empty attributes for decorative images.
The benchmark shows whether the website is conspicuously weak in comparison. For the implementation, it is then important to separate decorative images from really relevant content images.
The benchmark alone does not yet say which measure should be implemented first. In the website audit, the value is combined with URL type, severity, priority and specific findings.
Compare your own domainPer URL: Number of img elements with non-empty ALT divided by all img elements, times 100. URLs without img elements do not provide a numerical value for this metric.
Six described content images and four decorative images with alt="" make 60%. This can be appropriate; 100% is not a blanket quality target.
First, the mean of the available URL values per domain is created. This page displays the median of these domain values; large websites do not get any extra weight from their image count.
Assess image function and context: information, decoration or control. File names, keyword lists or incorrect descriptions also increase the number value.
A benchmark is a benchmark, not an absolute truth. Important is the deviation to the own website and the question of whether the signal for the affected pages is business relevant.
The baseline takes numerical metrics from the latest stored crawl per domain into account, if this was successful. Missing values do not enter as 0. Segments are only calculated from five available domain values. The selection is not a random sample and not a representative market share.
The current sampler selects up to ten URLs from sitemap or internal links; successful retrievals are combined into a domain mean for each metric. Older data sets can be based on a single page. In the case of shares, the page shows the mean value of the domain values, in the case of ALT coverage their median. Not all URLs of a website are examined.
Canonicals are a quiet but important indexing signal: they help search engines merge variants of a page cleanly.
SnippetsMeta descriptions are not a direct ranking lever, but they do influence how convincing a page is in the search result.
Structured dataStructured data makes content more explicit: organization, website, breadcrumbs, articles, products or local company data become easier to read for machines.
