🧩 Why Tracking Pixels Appear in Alt Text Tasks

Site Audit scans every image on your pages, including invisible 1×1 tracking pixels fired by third-party scripts such as bat.bing.com, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel, and similar services. These pixels are not real content images, so adding alt text to them provides no SEO value. However, because they technically lack an alt attribute, the audit flags them as issues and inflates your missing-alt-text count — sometimes by hundreds or even thousands of items.

🎯 What This Means for Your SEO Score

When tracking 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.

Filtering these URLs out lets the audit surface only the images that truly need your attention.

🛠️ How to Exclude Tracking Pixel Domains from Site Audit

1. In the left sidebar, click OTTO SEO → SEO Automation to open the OTTO SEO dashboard (URL: /seo-automation-v3).

2. Select the project you want to work with, then navigate to your Site Audit settings.

3. Locate the Excluded URLs or Crawl Exclusions field within the audit configuration.

4. Add the full domain or URL pattern for each tracking pixel source you want to ignore. Common examples include:

   • bat.bing.com
   • www.facebook.com/tr
   • www.google-analytics.com
   • ad.doubleclick.net

5. Save your changes, then re-run the Site Audit so the crawler applies the new exclusion rules.

Once the audit completes, the flagged alt text task count will reflect only your real on-page images.

✅ Best Practices for Managing Alt Text Tasks

• Exclude by domain pattern: Using a root domain like bat.bing.com catches all pixel variants under that domain without requiring you to list individual URLs.
• Review periodically: New marketing or analytics tools added to your site may introduce new pixel domains. Check your alt text task list after major tag deployments.
• Prioritise content images first: Once tracking pixels are excluded, sort remaining tasks by page priority or organic traffic to fix the highest-impact images first.
• 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

Exclusions apply at the crawl level, meaning the excluded domains will not appear in any audit task — not just the alt text report. Confirm that you are only excluding third-party tracking domains and not any first-party image paths that may contain legitimate content.

If your site loads tracking pixels through a tag manager container rather than direct script calls, the pixel URLs may still appear during crawl. In that case, exclude the rendered image source URLs that appear in the audit findings rather than the tag manager domain itself.

💬 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 the audit finishes, open your Site Audit results and navigate to the Images or Alt Text task list. The number of missing alt text issues should drop substantially. If you still see entries from the excluded domains, double-check that the URL patterns were entered correctly and that the audit was fully re-run.