Google’s John Mueller said in the latest Search Off the Record podcast that you should leave decorative alt text on your images empty and blank. Oh, and John later said, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) also says you should do that.

At the 17: 13 mark in the podcast, John said “But once it gets into things like, “Oh, this is a concept,” or like, “It’s decorative,” so it doesn’t… There’s some places that say, “Oh, you don’t need to put alt text in a decorative image.” Like if it’s purely there just for aesthetics, then it’s better to just leave the alt text empty.”

Here is the embed:

As John pointed out on Twitter later the W3C also recommends this, as they wrote here:

Here is more of the context around this:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Simchat Torah.