How to Find Missing Image Alt Text Across Your Site

Missing image alt text is one of those issues that hides in plain sight.

Every page looks fine in a browser, but underneath, images ship without the attribute that describes them to screen readers and search engines.

Finding every instance by hand is slow and unreliable, especially when the same image appears on many pages with different alt text in each place.

This guide walks through a repeatable way to find missing alt text across a whole site.

It also explains the two distinct problems you might be looking at, and how to export a working list your team can fix.

Why alt text matters to your team

Alt text (alternative text) lives inside the HTML of a page and describes an image.

It serves two audiences.

First, it supports web accessibility for blind and visually impaired visitors, and it appears in place of the image when the image cannot be displayed.

Second, search engines use it to understand what the image contains, according to Screaming Frog’s tutorial on the topic source.

For a revenue operations leader, the practical stakes are straightforward.

Images without usable alt text create accessibility friction for prospects and customers, and they waste an opportunity to give search engines context.

Neither problem shows up in a visual review of the site, which is why a crawl-based check is the reliable route.

Missing alt attribute vs missing alt text

Before you audit anything, it helps to know that “missing alt text” actually describes two different situations.

The alt attribute is the HTML slot that holds the description; the alt text is the words inside it.

Both can be absent in different ways.

• Missing alt attribute: the image element has no alt attribute at all, like <img src="logo.jpg">.
• Missing alt text: the alt attribute exists but is empty or contains only whitespace, like <img src="logo.jpg" alt="">.

The distinction matters because of how screen readers behave.

Screaming Frog notes that decorative images should have empty alt text rather than a missing attribute.

Leaving the attribute out entirely can cause issues in screen readers source.

In practice, they observe, decorative images often ship without the attribute anyway.

Where possible, they suggest serving decorative images as CSS background images instead source.

So when you audit, do not treat every flagged image as a defect.

An empty alt attribute on a genuinely decorative image may be intentional and correct.

A missing attribute is the clearer problem to fix first.

Run a crawl to surface every image

The fastest way to audit alt text at scale is a site crawler.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is the documented example here, and its lite version is free for crawling up to 500 URLs source.

The workflow is short:

1. Open the tool, enter the URL of the site you want to crawl, and start the crawl.
2. Click the Images tab, which lists every image discovered during the crawl along with its size and the number of source pages linking to it.
3. Select an image and open the Image Details tab at the bottom. This shows every source page that references the image and the alt text used in each reference source.

That third step is where a manual approach falls apart.

Screaming Frog’s own example shows one image referenced from four pages with different alt text on each: one page uses a short label, the others are blank source.

Because alt text is set in the HTML of each referencing page rather than in one field next to the image file, the same image can carry many different descriptions across a site.

Any audit has to work at the page-reference level, not the image-file level.

Filter for the two problem types

Within the Images tab, use the filters to isolate the issues:

• The Missing Alt Text filter shows images that have an alt attribute, but it is empty or whitespace-only.
• The Missing Alt Attribute filter shows images with no alt attribute at all.

Keeping these separate matters because empty alt text can be a deliberate accessibility choice for decorative images.

A missing attribute usually is not source.

When you review results, sort each list by the pages that matter most commercially first, such as landing pages and product pages, before blog imagery.

For deciding what alt text each image type actually needs, Screaming Frog points to the W3C alt decision tree as a reference source.

It walks through the questions to ask for informative images, decorative images and everything in between.

Export a fixable list

Once the filters are set, export the results so someone can act on them:

• Use the export button on the Images tab with a filter applied to export just that filtered view of images.
• Use Bulk Export > Images > Images Missing Alt Attribute & Text to export all source pages that reference images missing alt text, alt attributes or both, together with the image URLs and blank alt text columns source.
• Use Bulk Export > Images > All Images when you want every source page and its alt text, including the missing entries, for a full baseline source.

The bulk export with source pages is the version worth building your fix queue around.

It tells the person editing a page exactly which page to open and which image on it needs attention, which removes the guesswork from remediation.

When the crawl misses images

Sometimes a crawl finishes and you know the site has more images than it found.

Screaming Frog documents two common causes source:

• JavaScript or CSS loading: images injected by scripts or set as CSS background images will not appear in a plain HTML crawl. Switch the crawler to JavaScript rendering to discover them, and make sure JS and CSS files are not blocked from crawling.
• Robots.txt restrictions: images blocked by robots.txt will not be fetched. You can ignore robots.txt for the audit or customise it to allow crawling of the image directories.

If your site relies heavily on JavaScript-rendered galleries or background imagery, plan for the rendering-enabled crawl from the start.

Otherwise you may discover the gap only after your first export.

Turning the export into a fix plan

An export is only useful if it becomes work.

A practical sequence:

1. Triage by page priority. Start with pages that carry conversion or ranking weight. A missing alt attribute on a primary landing page matters more than one on an archived post.
2. Separate decorative from informative. For each flagged image, decide whether it conveys meaning. Decorative images should get empty alt text or move to CSS backgrounds; informative images need a short, accurate description of their purpose.
3. Fix at the source. Because alt text is set per page reference, corrections happen in the CMS on each referencing page, not once per image file. Group your export rows by source page so each editor gets one page-level task list.
4. Re-crawl to verify. After fixes ship, re-run the same crawl and filters. The missing counts should fall, and any stragglers point to pages the fix round missed.

One caution for teams using templates: an image embedded in a shared template can appear on many pages, and fixing it once in the template resolves every reference.

Check whether a flagged image is template-level or page-level before assigning page-by-page work, or you will create duplicate effort.

Fitting alt text audits into broader site health work

An alt text audit rarely stands alone.

It usually runs alongside other crawl-based checks, and the same export-and-triage habits apply.

If you are building a wider remediation programme, it helps to see alt text as one item in a prioritised list rather than a standalone project.

Our guide on how to prioritize SEO issues from a site crawl covers how to sequence findings like this against everything else a crawl surfaces.

Alt text problems also share a structural trait with other page-level gaps: they are invisible until something crawls the site systematically.

The same is true of pages that no internal links point to.

If a crawl is already part of your routine, adding an orphan page check costs little extra effort and catches a different class of hidden problem.

Finally, remember that alt text lives in the HTML of each referencing page, which means the fix queue is fundamentally a page-level work list.

If your team coordinates content fixes across multiple tools or owners, see our article on keeping business records aligned across tools.

It addresses the matching problem of keeping page-level data consistent between systems.

And once fixes are live, finding the next round of on-page opportunities follows the same crawl-first logic described in how to find internal linking opportunities.

Key takeaways

• Alt text serves accessibility and helps search engines understand images; it is set in the HTML of each page that references an image, so one image file can have many different alt texts across a site.
• Distinguish a missing alt attribute from empty alt text. Empty alt text can be correct for decorative images; a missing attribute usually needs fixing.
• Crawl the site, filter the Images tab for both problem types, and bulk export with source pages so fixes map to specific pages.
• If images are missing from the crawl, enable JavaScript rendering or adjust robots.txt handling.
• Verify with a re-crawl after fixes, and fold the audit into your broader crawl-based site health routine.

The reliable way to find missing alt text is not to look harder at pages you remember.

It is to crawl everything, filter for the two failure modes, and export a page-level list that turns directly into fix work.

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