AI-Generated Images and Alt Text: What Actually Helps SEO

I look at a lot of AI-generated hero images and product shots these days, both in Rank Math support tickets and in my own e-commerce work at Si-Ra. The question people actually ask is “will Google penalize me for using AI images,” but that’s not the interesting question. The interesting question is whether anyone bothered to write real alt text once the image existed — and increasingly, the answer is no.

Google Doesn’t Score You on How the Image Was Made

Google’s public guidance on AI-assisted content, first laid out on the Search Central blog in February 2023 and reaffirmed since, is consistent on this point: quality signals matter, not production method. Google crawls and indexes AI-generated images the same way it handles any other image file, and there’s no Google requirement to disclose that an image was AI-generated for it to be crawled or ranked. That doesn’t mean AI images get a free pass — it means the evaluation criteria are the same ones that applied before generative tools existed: is the image genuinely useful on this page, does it load fast, and does it carry real, descriptive alt text.

What Alt Text Is Actually For

Alt text’s primary job has always been accessibility — it’s what a screen reader announces in place of an image for someone who can’t see it. Its SEO value, helping Google understand image content for image search and giving crawlers a bit of extra on-page context, is a secondary benefit riding on top of that accessibility function, not the other way around. The widely cited “keep it under about 125 characters” guidance isn’t a technical or Google-imposed limit; it’s a convention that grew out of how some older screen readers truncate or stop reading long alt attributes. Modern screen readers handle longer text better, but it’s still a reasonable ceiling for staying specific instead of rambling.

Where AI-Generated Images Actually Break Alt Text

The failure mode I see isn’t malicious, it’s laziness enabled by cheap generation. When producing images took real time and money, most site owners at least thought about each one. Now a store owner can generate twenty product lifestyle images in an afternoon, and the alt text either gets left blank, copied from the filename, or filled with something generic like “AI generated image of a product on a table” that describes the image technically without saying anything about why it’s on that page. That’s a worse outcome than before generative tools existed, not because the image is AI-made, but because volume went up while attention per image went down.

A Reasonable Workflow

• Let an AI tool draft the literal description of what’s in the image — that part it’s genuinely fast and decent at.
• Have a person edit that draft to state the image’s purpose on the page, not just its contents: “red ceramic mug with matte finish, front view” beats “a mug.”
• Don’t stuff keywords into alt text that wouldn’t appear in a normal description — Google’s documentation is explicit that this counts as keyword stuffing regardless of intent.
• Use empty alt text for purely decorative images, so screen readers skip them instead of reading out noise.
• Skip restating the filename or template boilerplate verbatim across every image on a page — that’s the pattern that reads as templated to both users and crawlers.

The mistake was never using an AI-generated image. It’s treating alt text as a solved problem the moment the image exists. AI can draft what’s literally in the picture; it can’t tell you why that picture is on that specific page, and that’s the only part screen reader users and Google’s systems actually care about.

Image origin and image accessibility are two separate problems, and generative tools only solved the first one. If anything, the discipline required went up, not down — you’re now making decisions about far more images per site than you used to, and each one still needs a human to answer one simple question: what is this image actually doing here.