32.7% of Website Homepages Have at Least One Image With No Alt Text

A blind customer visits a shop's homepage with a screen reader. The software reads the headline, then reaches the product photos and says only "image, image, image". The same thing happens when a search engine looks at the page: without a description, it has no words to tell it what the picture shows.

That description is alt text, a short line of text attached to each image in a page's code. Screen readers read it aloud to people who cannot see the image, and search engines use it to understand the picture and show it in image search. It takes seconds to write, and a missing one costs a business both a customer who uses a screen reader and a chance to appear in image results.

32.7% of website homepages with images have at least one image with no alt text. Counted image by image, 11.1% of homepage images have none, and another 27.6% have empty alt text, which is only correct for purely decorative images.

We used the September 2026 HTTP Archive, a public dataset that tests millions of websites every month, and counted every image on 14,706,316 mobile homepages, 591,471,197 images in all. For each image we recorded whether it had alt text, empty alt text, or no alt text at all. We added the result of Google's Lighthouse alt text check for each homepage, and grouped sites by popularity using Google's Chrome UX Report.

Alt text is written as an alt attribute on an image. An image with no alt attribute gives screen readers and search engines nothing. An empty alt attribute (alt="") is a deliberate instruction to skip the image, which is correct for decoration such as dividers and background shapes but wrong for an image that carries meaning. Lighthouse, Google's free website testing tool, fails a page when a meaningful image has no alt text.

At the page level the problem is larger than the image count suggests. The average homepage carries about 40 images, and a single missing attribute on a logo, a banner or a product thumbnail is enough to leave part of the page undescribed. That is how 11.1% of images turns into one homepage in three.

Google's own test agrees. 26.2% of homepages fail Lighthouse's alt text check, making it the second most common basic SEO failure on the web, after a missing meta description.

27.6% of homepage images have empty alt text, more than twice the share with none at all. Empty alt text is correct for decoration, but some website builders and themes insert it by default when an image is uploaded, so editors believe the job is done when the image has never been described.

Empty alt text rises steadily as sites get smaller: 18.2% of images on the 10,000 most visited sites, 21.8% on sites ranked 10,000 to 1 million and 28.1% on sites outside the top million. The smaller the site, the more of its images are marked as decoration.

Missing alt text does not follow a simple slope. Sites ranked between 10,000 and 1 million have the highest share of images with no alt attribute, at 13.1%. The 10,000 most visited sites sit at 11.6%, and sites outside the top million at 11%.

For every group, the image-level rate hides the page-level problem. With around 40 images on the average homepage, even a low share of unlabeled images leaves one homepage in three with at least one image a screen reader cannot describe.

List every image on your site with no alt attribute or empty alt text; free accessibility checkers and Lighthouse in Chrome will show them. Add a short, plain description to each image that carries meaning, such as a product, a team photo, a chart or a logo. Keep empty alt text only for pure decoration.

Then check what your website builder does by default. If it inserts empty alt text on upload, make the alt field a required part of adding an image, so every new photo gets described when it is published. Recheck after any redesign, since a new template can change these defaults.

For sites that need to meet accessibility standards, a website accessibility consultant can find every undescribed image and fix the templates that create them.

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