Alt Text

Alt text (alternative text) is the written description attached to an image in a page's code. It was created for accessibility — screen readers speak it to people who can't see the image — and it remains a legal and ethical requirement for that reason. It also became the way search engines understand images, since they index the words rather than the pixels, and it is now the way many AI tools learn what a product photo shows, because most of them read the page's text and skip or only roughly interpret its images.

For a store, that makes alt text the difference between a photo that is searchable and one that isn't. "IMG_4032.jpg" tells no one anything; "hand-painted red Dala horse, 4 inch, front view on white background" ranks in image search, describes the product to a screen-reader user, and gives an AI tool a fact it can use in an answer. Good alt text describes the picture plainly — what the item is, its colour or material, the angle — without stuffing keywords. Every platform provides an alt field per image in the product editor; filling it for the best sellers first is the practical order.