GRACE: I’ll take this one first, because it’s secretly a writing question wearing a technical costume. A handmade ceramics shop wants to stuff keywords into every image’s alt text, “handmade ceramic mug pottery stoneware coffee cup buy online,” that kind of thing, on the theory it helps image search and the page rank. Here’s what gets lost. Alt text is a sentence a real person hears. A blind user with a screen reader has that text read aloud to them. So the first question isn’t “what does Google want,” it’s “what would you say to someone describing this photo out loud.” Nobody describes a mug as “handmade ceramic mug pottery stoneware coffee cup buy online.” That’s not a description, it’s a keyword dump, and it’s read aloud as gibberish.
DANA: So before we even get to whether it helps SEO, there’s a user being harmed, and that reframes the whole thing. Let me hold the supposed tension in view, accessibility versus SEO, because the shop thinks they’re trading one for the other. I suspect that trade is fake. Who can test whether it’s actually a tradeoff or a false choice?
MARCUS: That’s the part I want to hit, because the shop has set up a conflict that doesn’t exist. They think there’s accessibility alt text and SEO alt text and they have to pick. There isn’t. The alt text that serves the blind user, a clear, accurate, natural description, is the same alt text search engines reward, because search engines are trying to understand what the image actually shows. “Stoneware coffee mug with a speckled blue glaze” helps the screen reader and tells Google exactly what the image is. The keyword dump helps neither. So this isn’t accessibility versus SEO. It’s good description versus spam, and spam loses on both counts at once.
HANNAH: And I can ground that without overstating it. The documented guidance treats alt text as descriptive text for accessibility first, and keyword-stuffed alt attributes are explicitly called out as something to avoid. What I won’t claim is a precise ranking penalty per stuffed image, because that’s not published as a hard rule. The defensible statement is the one Marcus made, a natural accurate description is what’s recommended for both the assistive-technology user and image understanding, and stuffing works against both. The shop’s premise that stuffing buys an SEO edge is the weak link.
ELENA: There’s a category the shop is almost certainly getting wrong too, decorative images. Not every image needs descriptive alt text. A background texture, a divider line, a purely decorative flourish, those should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them. If the shop blankets keyword-stuffed alt across every image including the decorative ones, they’re forcing screen readers to announce keyword soup for images that carry no information at all. So “alt text on everything, packed with keywords” is wrong twice, wrong content on the meaningful images, and wrong presence on the decorative ones.
SOFIA: And on the actual payoff they’re chasing, image search, the stuffing is self-defeating. If someone searches for a speckled blue mug and the image surfaces, what wins the click is that the image and its description genuinely match what they wanted. A keyword pile doesn’t make the image more relevant to any single query, it makes it vaguely associated with many and precisely right for none. For a ceramics shop where the product photo is the product, an accurate description is the conversion tool. The dump dilutes the very thing that would have sold it.
NOAH: Same pattern we keep meeting, and naming it is half the cure. “Put keywords in every alt text” is the identical instinct to “every keyword in the H1” and “every schema type”, more of a signal assumed to be linearly more good. Alt text has a job, describe the image, and stuffing breaks the job to chase a signal that doesn’t reward stuffing anyway. The tell is the same, “every image” plus “as many keywords as possible.” And if they’re stuffing alt text, the meta and headings are probably stuffed too. Worth checking the whole on-page approach, not just images.
THEO: The decision rule here is unusually clean, so I’ll just state it. For each image, ask what a person would say describing it to someone who can’t see it. If the image conveys information, write that description, naturally, and the relevant keyword usually appears on its own because it’s literally what the thing is. If the image is decorative, give it empty alt text so it’s skipped. That single test handles every image on the site, and it satisfies accessibility and SEO simultaneously, because they were never actually in conflict.
AIKO: Maintenance note, brief because the others covered the substance. Alt text gets written once at upload and rarely revisited, and on a shop where products rotate, stale or templated alt text accumulates fast. So the durable practice is making natural description part of the upload process, one good sentence per meaningful image, empty for decorative, rather than a keyword template applied in bulk that someone has to undo later. Build the habit at the point of upload, not as a cleanup project.
DANA: Here’s the call, and the key is that the conflict the shop built doesn’t exist. We do not stuff keywords into alt text. We write alt text the way you’d describe the image to someone who can’t see it, accurate, natural, specific, and we leave decorative images with empty alt so screen readers skip them. That single approach serves the blind user and search engines at the same time, because Marcus is right, this was never accessibility versus SEO, it was description versus spam. For a ceramics shop the honest description is also the best image-search and conversion asset, because the photo is the product and the words just need to tell the truth about it. We apply Theo’s test per image, informative gets a real sentence, decorative gets empty alt, and we bake it into the upload habit so it stays clean. The shop wanted an SEO edge. The edge was always just describing the work well.
GRACE: Which is where I started, the technical answer and the human answer turned out to be the same sentence.
DANA: That’s it. You’re not choosing between the screen reader and the search engine. Describe the image honestly and you’ve already served both.