To a machine, a product photo with no alt text is a product with no description. Google says it reads alt text together with computer vision and the rest of the page to understand an image, and the alt text is the part you write in your own words. Leave it empty and every product photo gives those systems less to go on.
- To a machine, a product photo with no alt text is a product with no description. Google reads alt text together with what it sees in the image and on the page.
- Empty alt, a filename like
IMG_2381.jpg, or keyword-stuffing all read as nothing useful (or as spam). - Good alt text is a plain, specific description of the product in the image. Material, type, colour, key feature.
- On Shopify you set alt text per image in the product media editor; it’s a fast, high-leverage pass on your best sellers.
Alt text was filed under accessibility for so long that most merchants treat it as a checkbox for screen readers and skip it. That framing is now expensive. The same text that describes an image to a visually impaired shopper also tells an AI system, in plain words, what is in the picture. Google says it uses alt text along with computer vision and the rest of the page to understand an image, so an empty alt attribute leaves the machine with less to go on.
Why your photos are invisible without it
Your product images carry enormous selling information. Colour, material, shape, context, who it is for. A human absorbs all of it in a glance. A machine reads the file as data it cannot interpret unless you have told it, in words, what the image shows. Alt text is that telling. Empty alt attributes turn a rich visual catalog into a wall of unlabelled boxes.
What good alt text looks like
Useless: alt="IMG_4821" or alt="product". Useful: alt="women’s waterproof leather hiking boot in tan, ankle height". The good version names the thing the way a shopper would describe it. Specific, plain, and full of the attributes a machine can match against a query. This is the same discipline as putting your selling facts into structured fields rather than burying them in prose: say the concrete thing, clearly, where a machine can read it.
| Alt text | What AI reads |
|---|---|
alt="" (empty) |
No words from you, only what the machine can infer |
alt="IMG_2381.jpg" |
A filename, no product meaning |
alt="boots boots cheap boots" |
A spam signal, not a description |
alt="Brown leather waterproof hiking boot, wide fit" |
The product. Material, type, key features |
The Shopify reality
Shopify gives every product image an alt-text field, and many stay empty since nothing requires you to fill them. That is the opportunity: it is unglamorous, it is entirely in your control, and it directly affects whether your products are legible to AI. Fill the alt text on your best sellers first, describe them the way a customer would, and you have made a blind catalog see. It all rolls up into whether a machine can read your store at all.
A scan is a snapshotlegibility drifts
Descriptive alt text is never settled. A theme update rewrites your robots or templates, an app injects a script, a migration spawns redirects, and the layer a crawler reads regresses silently while the storefront still looks perfect to you. Your store changes weekly, so being reachable and readable is a moving target, not a one-time pass. That is why serious stores measure, fix, and re-measure, and why we re-scan our own store on a schedule, in public.
Questions people actually ask
Is alt text only for accessibility?
Not anymore. Alt text still serves screen readers, and that reason alone is enough. But it is now also the primary way AI systems understand what a product image contains, because they read the text attached to the image rather than seeing the picture itself.
What makes alt text good for AI?
Describe the image the way a shopper would say it out loud: specific, plain, and rich in real attributes like colour, material, type, and who it is for. Avoid filenames and vague words like product. The more concretely you name what is shown, the more a machine can match it to what someone is asking for.
Where do I add alt text on Shopify?
Every product image in Shopify has an alt-text field in the image settings, and most are empty by default. Start with your best sellers, fill in a plain, specific description for each, and you immediately make those products readable to the systems that were previously seeing blanks.
See what a machine sees
You cannot tell from your browser whether AI can read your store. You can find out in a few minutes. Run a free scan and see the exact layer the machine reads, and where you are losing the shortlist.
Sources: 2026 industry compilations on AI-search visibility; OpenAI (early 2026) on ChatGPT shopping queries; Adobe Analytics (2026) on AI-referred engagement. Figures are third-party and current as of mid-2026; we publish our own benchmark data as our scan volume grows.
Your buyers are already asking AI. This is how you make your website readable to the assistants they ask.
Everything in this article is measurable on a live storefront. The Catalog Assessment reads every product in your Shopify or Matrixify export, up to the plan limit, and returns catalog wide figures on what AI systems can read, with a fix list in priority order.