Putting Text in Images Is
an Invisible SEO Mistake

Walk through most professional services websites and you’ll find it: the firm’s key differentiators listed in a banner image. Accreditation logos alongside text that names the credential. Statistics in a designed graphic. The “why choose us” bullet points rendered as an infographic. All of it invisible to search engines and to AI systems, for the simple reason that neither can reliably read text embedded in an image.

This is one of the most common and most fixable visibility problems on professional services websites — and most firms don’t know it’s there because the site looks fine to a human visitor.

Why this keeps happening

It happens because images are easy to update without touching the website code. A designer can change the banner, update the statistics graphic, or refresh the credentials display without needing a developer. It also happens because visually designed text looks more polished than HTML text, and firms naturally want their most important claims to look their best. And it happens because the people creating the content often don’t know — and aren’t thinking about — the gap between what a human can see and what a machine can read.

What machines actually see

Google has image recognition capabilities and can sometimes extract text from images, but this is inconsistent and the extracted text doesn’t carry the same indexing weight as HTML text on the page. It’s treated as supplementary context, not as the primary content of the page.

AI systems generating search answers typically draw from the text content of a page — the actual HTML. Not from image-embedded text, and not from alt tags alone. A credential that only exists as a logo image or banner text is, from a search and AI citation perspective, as if it wasn’t stated at all.

This is particularly costly for claims with high trust value: a specific accreditation, a named professional body membership, a year of establishment, a transaction count. These are precisely the kinds of facts an AI system would cite if it found them — and precisely the ones most likely to be hidden in images.

What to move into HTML

The priority is information with the highest search and trust value: specific service descriptions, named credentials and accreditations, verifiable claims like “established 1998” or “1,400 completed transactions”, testimonial quotes with attribution, and statistics. These should be in HTML text — not necessarily without visual design, but the words themselves should be readable by a machine as well as a person.

Moving these into HTML doesn’t mean sacrificing visual quality. The text can still be styled, sized, and positioned exactly as before. The difference is that it’s in the page’s HTML source rather than baked into an image file.

What to keep as images

Images remain the right choice for genuinely visual content: photographs, diagrams, logos as design elements, decorative graphics. The practical rule is: if a person using a screen reader would miss something important by not hearing this described, it should be in HTML text. If it’s purely decorative, it can stay in the image. For more on the five structural changes affecting visibility for professional services firms, the Five Things That Changed Online Visibility article covers this alongside the others.

Common questions

Can’t I just add alt text to fix the problem?

Alt text helps with accessibility and gives Google minimal context, but it’s not the same as HTML text. Alt text describes an image — it doesn’t function as page content that AI systems and search crawlers index with the same weight as actual paragraphs, headings, and structured data. For key claims and credentials, HTML text is significantly better than alt text on an image.

How do I audit my own site for text-in-images?

Use your browser’s Developer Tools (right-click, Inspect) and look at pages with your most important claims. If those claims are in img tags rather than in headings, paragraphs, or list items, they’re image-embedded. You can also try selecting text on your homepage — anything that can’t be selected and copied by cursor is either in an image or a non-selectable element, which means machines can’t reliably read it either.