Live index · crawling the top 1M websites
39% of images on the web's top sites have bad alt text
12.6% have no alt text at all and 26.2% have junk alt like filenames, across 725,806 images on 6,412 sites so far. See our live crawl in action below.
Raw-HTML crawl of each homepage and up to 3 inner pages. Updates continuously.
12.6%
Missing alt
No alt attribute at all, so screen readers often read out the file name instead.
26.2%
Junk alt
Filenames, “image”, “IMG_1234” or placeholder text that describes nothing.
38.6%
Sites affected
Share of sites with at least one image missing alt text.
Cite or embed this index
Journalists, bloggers and researchers are welcome to use these figures. Please link back to this page.
Embed the live tracker
<iframe src="https://alttextmeta.com/embed/report" width="100%" height="1500" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Alt Text Census: State of the alt-web embed (long form)"></iframe> <p style="font-size:12px;color:#6b7280;margin:6px 0 0;text-align:right">Live data: <a href="https://alttextmeta.com/state-of-the-alt-web">Alt Text Census by alttextmeta.com</a></p>
Citation
According to the live State of the Alt-Web index by Alt Text Meta, 39% of images on the world's top websites have missing or junk alt text (https://alttextmeta.com/state-of-the-alt-web).
How it works
- We work through a list of the world's top 1 million domains, fetching the raw HTML of each homepage and up to 3 inner pages.
- Every image is checked for a missing alt attribute or junk alt text, using the same checks as our free Health Check.
- Figures are running totals and change as the crawl continues. Images that are decorative may correctly use empty alt. See our alt text decision tree.
How does your site score?
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