# **🧩 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.