Pinterest is a visual search engine. Are your images actually searchable?
Most Pinterest creators never touch the alt text field. The data on what happens when you do is hard to ignore.
Most creators who use Pinterest think carefully about their images. The aspect ratio (2:3, always), the colors, the text overlay, the board strategy. They treat Pinterest like the visual platform it is.
What they don’t think about: the alt text field sitting quietly beneath the pin description. The one most people have never touched.
What alt text does on Pinterest
Alt text on Pinterest works the same way it does anywhere else on the web — it’s a written description of an image, read aloud by screen readers for users who are blind or have low vision. Pinterest has supported it for years. It lives under “More options” when you’re creating or editing a pin, and it has a 500-character limit.
Most pins have nothing in it.
The part creators care about
Here’s where it gets interesting. A study analyzing over a million pins found that pins with alt text earned 25% more impressions, 123% more outbound clicks, and 56% more profile visits compared to pins without it.
That’s not a marginal SEO bump. That’s a significant performance gap — for a field most creators don’t know exists.
The reason isn’t mysterious. Pinterest is a discovery engine. Its algorithm is constantly trying to understand what content is about so it can surface it to the right people. Alt text is one more clear signal. When you describe what’s actually in your image, you’re not gaming the algorithm — you’re just giving it information it can use.
One thing worth knowing: alt text and pin description are not the same thing
A lot of creators don’t realize Pinterest has two separate text fields for each pin. The pin description is your marketing copy — the searchable text users see below the image. Alt text is a separate field, specifically for accessibility, that most users never see at all.
They do different jobs. If your pin description is missing, Pinterest may pull from the alt text as a fallback — but that’s a workaround, not a strategy. Ideally, both fields are filled in, and they’re written differently: the description is keyword-forward and written for people scrolling through search results; the alt text describes what’s literally in the image.
Why most pins are missing it
The field is buried. On desktop, it’s under a “More options” dropdown when you create or edit a pin. On mobile, you have to scroll past everything else to find it. It’s not prominent, it’s not required, and if you’re publishing at any kind of volume, it’s the first thing that gets skipped.
The result is a platform full of beautiful, carefully designed pins that are invisible to screen readers — and leaving performance on the table for everyone else.
The faster way to fill it in
If you have a backlog of pins with empty alt text, the manual fix is exactly as tedious as it sounds. But there are tools that can generate descriptions for images automatically — you supply the image, they return a clear, accurate description you can review and drop into the field.
It doesn’t eliminate the step. You still look at it, you still own the copy. But it makes the blank field a lot harder to justify leaving blank — especially when the data on what filled fields actually do is this clear.