Why text in an image remains invisible

Many entrepreneurs have their opening hours, address or a list of services placed in a nicely formatted image. It looks professional on the website, and that is precisely why it is often done. A designer creates a banner with the text in it, and that banner appears on the homepage. The problem is that a computer does not read an image the way you do. Google and AI assistants such as ChatGPT see pixels, not letters. They therefore do not know that the image states you are open from nine to five, or that you offer three types of repairs. For them, that information simply does not exist. This has been an issue with Google for some time, but becomes even more important with AI assistants. When someone asks an AI assistant where they can find a plumber nearby, or what a particular business does, that assistant retrieves its answer from text that it can read. If your offering is only in an image, you simply will not be mentioned. Not because you are not good enough, but because the information is technically invisible. What you can check yourself Go to your own website and try to select the text on the page with your mouse, the way you would to copy and paste. Can you do this with your opening hours, address or service overview? Then it is real text on the page and a search engine or AI assistant can read it. If you cannot, and the text is part of an image, that is a sign that you can take action. The solution is not complicated. Important information such as your services, prices, opening hours and contact details you simply place as text on the page, separate from any images you use for atmosphere. You are welcome to show a nice photo of your shop or workshop, but the actual information should be in readable text, not incorporated into the image itself. The same applies to logos with a tagline in them, or infographics with steps in your work process. If that information does not appear anywhere else on the page in plain text, you are missing the opportunity for a search engine or AI assistant to pick up that information and pass it on to someone looking for it. The good news is that this is something you can often adjust yourself, or something you can easily ask your website administrator to do. Review your most important pages: the homepage, the contact page and the page with your services. Check whether the core information can be selected as text. Where it cannot, you add a short text version next to the image. It takes you an hour of work, and it ensures that the information you already have on your website can actually be found by those looking for it.