🧩 Why Tracking Pixels (Usually) Don't Appear in Alt Text Tasks

Site Audit builds alt-text tasks from the <img> elements it finds on each crawled page. Images are analyzed as part of the page that hosts them — they are never crawled or audited as separate URLs. Before an image is stored, two automatic filters run:

• Known tracking-pixel URLs are skipped — including bat.bing.com, Facebook pixel URLs, Google Analytics collection URLs, and DoubleClick domains.
• Tiny images are skipped — images declared as 0×0 or 1×1 never become alt-text tasks.

Because of this, the common tracking pixels should never reach your alt-text task list. If your list is still filling up with third-party images, they are pixels the automatic filter does not recognize yet.

🎯 What This Means for Your SEO Score

When unrecognized pixels dominate your missing-alt-text task list, two problems occur:

• Your overall SEO score appears lower than it actually is for real content.
• Your team wastes time reviewing non-actionable items instead of fixing genuine image accessibility issues.

Clearing them out lets the audit surface only the images that truly need your attention.

🛠️ What Actually Works — and What Doesn't

What doesn't work: adding the pixel's domain (for example bat.bing.com) to the Site Audit URL exclusions list. URL exclusions are matched against the URLs of your own pages — they never match the source of an image embedded in a page — so an external image domain in that list has no effect on image tasks.

What works:

1. Delete or ignore the individual tasks. This is the fastest option. Note that if the image is still not recognized as a tracker, the same task can reappear after the next recrawl.
2. Exclude the hosting page — only when that page itself is low-value (for example a thank-you or confirmation page loaded with pixels). In OTTO SEO → Site Audit → All Audits, click the ⋮ menu on your site's row, select Crawl Settings, and add a URL exclusion matching that page's path. This removes all analysis for that page, not just its images, so use it only for pages you do not want audited anyway.
3. Report a recurring unrecognized pixel to our support team. Search Atlas maintains an internal tracker filter, and a new pixel pattern can be added there so it is skipped for every site — this is the durable fix.

✅ Best Practices for Managing Alt Text Tasks

• Prioritise content images first: sort remaining tasks by page priority or organic traffic to fix the highest-impact images first.
• Review after tag deployments: new marketing or analytics tools can inject images the filter doesn't know yet. Check your alt-text task list after major tag changes.
• Use descriptive alt text: for real images that are flagged, write concise, keyword-relevant descriptions that reflect both the image content and the page topic.

⚠️ Important Considerations

• Third-party alone does not exempt an image. A real <img> element with real dimensions that is not on the tracker list can be legitimately flagged — in that case the correct fix is to give it proper alt text, not to suppress the task.
• Tag-manager scripts are handled separately. Pixels injected purely by JavaScript are not <img> elements in the crawled HTML, so they do not produce image tasks at all.

💬 Need Further Help?

If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.

Additional Notes

After a recrawl, deleted tasks for an unrecognized pixel may return — that repetition is the signal to report the pixel pattern to support so it can be added to the internal tracker filter.