og:image:alt present
What it checks
AI agents cannot process images directly and rely on og:image:alt text to understand your page’s visual content. Without alt text, the OG image is invisible to text-based AI systems that generate answers and summaries about your page.
Why it matters
og:description and og:image are read by AI answer engines and used to populate the preview card / thumbnail shown next to a citation. Falsifiable: no vendor doc from any AI engine names either property, and no published log or output study demonstrates their use.
Evidence
Open Graph og:description and og:image
The OGP spec establishes og:description and og:image as standard, near-universally deployed properties with real social-unfurler consumers. Their mechanism is well understood and cheap to satisfy. AI answer surfaces do render thumbnails and blurbs alongside citations, which makes the claim plausible.
Limits
Plausible is all it is. Google names only og:title and og:site_name in its documentation — og:description is conspicuously absent from the snippet-sources doc, and og:image is absent from image-appearance docs. Apple’s Applebot page describes “a representative image” for snippet-enabled pages without attributing it to og:image. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity say nothing about Open Graph at all. Treat these as social-sharing hygiene reported for completeness, not as AI-readiness scoring inputs.
Sources
- The Open Graph protocol — Open Graph protocol (originated at Facebook), Open Web Foundation Agreement v0.9, spec (verified 2026-08-21)
- Control your title links in search results — Google Search Central, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- Site names in Google Search — Google Search Central, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-20)
- About Applebot — Apple, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- OpenAI crawlers and user agents — OpenAI, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler? — Anthropic, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- Perplexity Crawlers — Perplexity, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-20)