Image alt text and Meta health restrictions: the hidden words on your product pages

This is the one nobody checks, so it is worth a thread of its own.

When we went through a maternity store that Meta had restricted, the photos were fine. There was nothing medical in them. But behind every product image sits alt text, the short description that screen readers read aloud and search engines index. On this store it had been filled with full product descriptions, probably by whoever set the products up or by an app copying the description across. The home page alone had 75 images whose alt text said pregnant or postpartum.

Nobody had ever seen it, because you do not see alt text. A crawler does. Vendor reports say Meta's classifier reads site content, and alt text is part of the page. So the store was carrying 75 copies of the words it most needed to remove, in the one place the owner never looked.

How to check your own: open a product page, view the page source and search for alt=. Do the same on the home page and your top collection. If you would rather not read HTML, most SEO crawlers list alt text for every image. You are looking for condition words, treatment names, claims, and whole product descriptions pasted in.

How to fix it without hurting accessibility: alt text is meant to describe the image, not sell the product. Woman in a navy wrap dress, side view is better alt text than a paragraph of copy, for a screen reader user and for search. So the fix is also the correct way to write alt text. Describe what is visible, honestly, and leave the claims and condition words out.

What not to do: do not delete alt text altogether. That hurts people who use screen readers and does nothing a good description would not do. And do not hide words from crawlers while showing them to people. That is exactly the kind of mismatch that makes things worse.

Fixing alt text will not lift a restriction by itself. It is one item on a list that also includes product titles, the meta description, claims, Shopify's data sharing and what your events carry. But it is often the biggest item by volume, and it is the one most people miss.

Has anyone audited alt text across a whole store? How much did you find?

For reference, DataCops Health mode cleans what is sent to Meta, but it cannot change what is written on your pages. Alt text is a fix you make in Shopify or your theme.