Text in an image is not found

Many entrepreneurs place their opening hours, address or an offer in a nicely designed image on the website. It looks polished, but it has a disadvantage that is not immediately visible. Google and AI assistants such as ChatGPT read the text of your website, not the images on it. If your opening hours are in a JPEG file, a search engine only sees an image. The letters you put in it are not read, not indexed and therefore not shown if someone searches for when you are open. The same applies to menus, price lists and contact details. A restaurant that puts its entire menu as a photo on the website is invisible to a search engine in that regard. Someone searching for a specific dish in the area will not find that page, even though the dish is certainly on it. What you should and should not put as text It is not about removing all images. A photo of your premises, your products or your team can remain a photo. It is about information that people and search engines need to find you or understand what you do. Think of: Your address, telephone number and opening hours What kind of business you have and what you offer Prices, services or product descriptions You place this information as ordinary, readable text on the page. An image may be next to it for illustration, but the core information must be text on the page. Why this also applies to AI assistants More and more people ask questions to ChatGPT or similar assistants instead of searching via Google. Someone like that might ask, for example, which plumber in the area is available on Saturday. That assistant gets his answer from text he found somewhere, not from a photo on your website. If that information is only in an image, then you simply do not exist for that assistant in that respect. What you can do today Go to your own website and view the page with contact details and the page with your services or products. Is the most important information there as readable text, or have you embedded it in a banner, a logo-like image or a pdf that is actually a scan? If the latter is the case, simply type that information over as normal text on the page itself. It is not a major technical intervention. It takes half an hour, maybe an hour if you have many pages. But it ensures that what you find important to tell is actually read by the systems that must lead people to you.