KinetixSEO research sweep · November 2026
How Many Websites Miss Image Alt Text?
On 21% of the websites we scanned that show images on their homepage, at least one image has no alt text.
On the other 79%, every image carries alt text.
Based on 5,203 homepages of public websites (Tranco ranks 1,000 to 100,000, drawn at random), scanned 5 to 12 November 2026. See the full edition.
21% of 5,203 sites
What it means
Why this number matters
Alt text is the text alternative of an image: what a screen reader reads aloud, and what search engines read to know what the image shows.
An image without alt text gives screen-reader users no description and is harder for image search to place. One missing alt counts here, so the share says how common the slip is, not how bad each site is.
Check your own site: the free Accessibility Checker lists the images on one of your pages that have no alt text, with the other accessibility basics.
Methodology
How this was measured
Scanned the homepage of each site in KinetixSEO's research sweep, a seeded random draw of public sites, between Nov 5, 2026 and Nov 12, 2026 with one unchanged version of the scanner, and counted the 5203 distinct sites on which the "Missing image alt text" check could run. A site counts once however often it was scanned, and counts as affected if any of its scans showed the issue.
The draw, its seed and the scanner version are public on the edition page, so anyone can redraw the same sites. Only aggregate counts are published — no per-site result.
Every edition
Edition history
Each edition is a new random draw of sites, so a change between editions is partly sampling noise.
| Edition | Share | Sample size |
|---|---|---|
| November 2026 | 21% | n = 5,203 |
| October 2026 | 23% | n = 2,027 |
| October 2026 | 26% | n = 217 |
How to cite
Use this data
KinetixSEO (2026). How Many Websites Miss Image Alt Text [Data set]. KinetixSEO research sweep, edition of November 2026, n = 5203. https://kinetixseo.com/learn/statistics/how-many-websites-miss-image-alt-text
Published under a CC BY 4.0 license: free to reuse with attribution. Download the edition's aggregate results as CSV or JSON .
More website statistics
- How Many Websites Have an llms.txt File? — 18% of the websites we scanned publish an llms.txt file.
- How Many Websites Block AI Crawlers? — At least 14% of the websites we scanned block at least one AI crawler in robots.txt.
- How Many Websites Use JSON-LD Structured Data? — 46% of the websites we scanned carry JSON-LD structured data on their homepage.
- How Many Websites Lack a Meta Description? — 22% of the websites we scanned have no meta description on their homepage.
- How Many Websites Have No XML Sitemap? — On 32% of the websites we scanned, no XML sitemap could be found.
- How Many Sites Skip Privacy, Contact or About? — 68% of the homepages we scanned do not link all three of a privacy policy, a contact page and an about page.
Where does your own site land?
Run the same scan on your own homepage with a free SEO and GEO check. No signup.