Newsflash, Google’s Martin Splitt said that “alt text is important for SEO too.” I did ask him how important, but he would not disclose that information.

Here is more of the context around this on Twitter.

So I had to ask:

I know, this is not new, here are some of our other stories on this topic over the years:

Google: If You Want Your Images To Rank Then Use Alt Text
Google: When Linking Images, Make Sure There Is Alt Text On Images
Google: Pages Can Rank For Image Alt Text Content In Web Search
Google: Alt Image Attribute Is Used By Web Search But More So For Image Search
Google: Alt Tags Should Be In The Language Of The Content Of The Page (Localized Alt Tags)
Google: Removing Alt Attributes From Images Sorta Okay If…
How Google Wants You To Use Alt Tags & Title Tags on Images
Google: Try To Use Anchor Text & Image Alt Text

Forum discussion at Twitter.