Amazon Closes a Long-Standing SEO Loophole in A+ Content
For years, Amazon sellers quietly stuffed keywords into image alt text fields inside A+ Content and Brand Story modules. Amazon never officially confirmed the practice worked. Sellers did it anyway, and many saw results. That loophole is now closed.
Amazon has replaced seller-controlled alt text with AI-generated descriptions across A+ Content and Brand Story. Sellers no longer have access to the field. The AI backfills it automatically, including on existing content that sellers had already populated with carefully chosen keywords.
Related reading: Best Practices for Amazon Product Photography
What Amazon Quietly Took Away
The alt text field in A+ Content allowed sellers to write up to 100 characters per image describing what was shown. Amazon's own help documentation stated the field “helps your products in search results.” That was all the confirmation most sellers needed. Agencies and SEO-focused sellers began treating alt text as additional indexing real estate, particularly useful for secondary keywords, long-tail terms, and Spanish-language queries on US listings targeting bilingual shoppers.
There was no official announcement when this changed. No Seller Central notification. No policy update. Sellers discovered it when the field disappeared.
Amazon now auto-generates alt text for all images using AI, including backfilling existing Brand Story assets. The rollout has been confirmed fully in Europe, with expansion to additional marketplaces expected. Sellers have no visibility into what the AI writes, and no ability to edit it.
Did Alt Text Actually Work?
This is where it gets complicated. Amazon never formally confirmed that alt text contributed to keyword indexing. Some sellers and agencies ran tests and observed ranking support for terms that appeared in alt text but nowhere else on the listing. Others saw no measurable impact. The debate ran for years without resolution.
What ended the debate is Amazon closing the field entirely. Marketplace Valet noted that Amazon's machine vision and image recognition models have deprecated the semantic field, shifting toward contextual image understanding rather than seller-submitted descriptions. Whether the indexing was ever real or sellers were filling in a field that did nothing, the outcome is the same: the field is gone and sellers have lost whatever coverage it provided.
Sellers testing Spanish-language keywords inserted only through alt text are among those most likely to notice gaps. If a term existed nowhere else on the listing, there is now no path for it to be indexed at all.
Related reading: Amazon’s New Image Policy: Platform Can Now Replace Your Product Photos
What Sellers Should Do Now
The recovery work is straightforward but requires a full audit. Compare the terms previously placed in alt text against current Search Query Performance data in Brand Analytics to identify any impressions or click gaps that have opened. Any term that lived only in alt text and appears nowhere else in the listing is now unindexed.
Redistribution should go into the fields Amazon does index. Backend search terms are the most direct replacement, with up to 250 bytes available per marketplace for terms that do not fit naturally into customer-facing copy. Titles carry the highest indexing weight and should be reviewed for any coverage gaps. Bullet points offer more flexibility than many sellers use.
Within A+ Content itself, text modules, comparison charts, and FAQ sections now carry more strategic value than they did when alt text was absorbing secondary keyword coverage. Sellers who built image-heavy A+ layouts with minimal text should consider rebalancing toward structures with more crawlable content.
The Pattern Behind the Change
This is not the first time Amazon has closed off a backend optimization field that sellers had turned into a keyword insertion point. The alt text removal follows a consistent pattern: a field exists, sellers find a way to use it for SEO, Amazon eventually standardizes or removes it.
The shift toward AI-generated image descriptions also fits Amazon's broader investment in machine vision. Amazon increasingly uses image recognition rather than seller-submitted metadata to understand what a product is and who should see it. Handing alt text over to AI is the logical next step in that direction.
The loophole is closed. The question now is whether sellers already updated their listings before noticing it was gone.
