Optimizing the site for search engines: Is Google able to read the text in images?

Since its inception, and in a large number of articles, the SEO site in Arabic has discussed many techniques for optimizing the site for search engines and explaining the secrets of these techniques, their negatives, advantages, and risks of declining rankings and the possibility of the site being subjected to Google penalties. There are many and varied techniques that are constantly being updated. If you are a follower of SEO in Arabic or interested in the field of optimizing the site for search engines, you must have read many articles and books on this topic, and therefore you must be fully aware that all of these techniques intersect at a certain point and It is reading written texts. No matter how different the technology is, it stems from the ability of Google's crawler to read a set of text characters. These characters may be the content of your site, or they may be texts and tags written in HTML, but in the end they remain a set of literal texts that Google's crawler can read with ease and thus process them and use these processing results to evaluate your page.

But what about the pictures?

If you are a follower of SEO techniques and preparing the site for search engines, the first thing that will come to your mind are those texts that are mentioned in the HTML tags of the image. Well, your prediction is correct, but what if Google could read the texts written within the image itself and not the regular texts? Will it not be able to give more accurate results when the user searches for images related to a specific topic? Some time ago, I read many articles talking about Google developing algorithms capable of reading text in images. Some denied and some supported Google reading text in images and using them as a factor in ranking image results. However, after searching and investigating, I found on the sixteenth of this March a tweet by Gary Illye on Twitter. In this tweet, one of Twitter users asks Gary the following question: Is Google able to read text in images?

The answer was “no.” Therefore, you can say, as of the date of writing this article, that Google is unable to read texts written within images, and therefore these texts do not play a role in the ranking and will not negatively or positively affect the efforts you are making to improve your site’s ranking in search results.