If your website sells with photos, good. Photos are how people decide to hire a painter, book a florist or trust a studio. We would never tell you to cover them up.
But there is a catch. The tools now answering "who should I hire in Raleigh" mostly read words. A beautiful page with almost no words gives them very little to work with.
Here is how to keep the photos and fix that.
Why can an AI assistant not see what your photos show?
You look at a photo of a freshly painted kitchen and see the finish, the color, the care. An assistant looking at the same page sees a file name, maybe an alt attribute, and whatever text sits nearby.
Some tools can interpret images to a degree. Do not build your visibility on that. The safe assumption is that the words on the page are the page.
That means a gallery of forty stunning images with a one-line heading is, to an assistant, a page about nothing in particular. It cannot cite what it cannot read.
What text should sit next to every image gallery?
A short written summary. Two to four sentences is plenty.
It should say:
- What kind of work this gallery shows
- Where the work was done, by city or neighborhood
- Who it was for, in general terms
- What is distinctive about how you did it
Write it like you would explain the gallery to a new customer standing next to you. Plain sentences. No slogans.
Place it directly above or below the grid. Not in a footer, and not in a hidden panel that only opens on click. If a person has to hunt for it, so does a machine.
How should you write captions and alt text that describe the work?
Alt text is not a place for keywords. It is a description for someone who cannot see the image.
Compare two versions:
- Weak: "painting, painter, Raleigh painter, best painter"
- Strong: "Living room with deep green walls and white trim, repainted"
The second one tells a reader, and a machine, what is actually there.
Captions do the heavier lifting. They are visible text, they sit next to the image, and people really read them. A good caption names the project, the place and one detail worth knowing. You do not need one for every image. Do it for the strongest ten or fifteen across the site.
How do you describe a project in words without cluttering a minimal design?
This is the real objection. Your designer built something spare on purpose, and you do not want paragraphs crashing into it.
Good news: you need less text than you fear, and you can style it to disappear.
- Small, quiet type under the image, not a block beside it
- One line of caption by default, with a fuller project note on its own page
- A dedicated page per major project, so the gallery stays clean and the words live one click deeper
- A project title and a location line, set in the same restrained style as everything else
Restraint is not the same as silence. A confident minimal site still says what it is.
What did image-forward sites for a studio, a farm and a painter have to add?
We built three sites where photography leads. Each one shows a different version of the same problem.
Fresh Snow Studio is a minimal portfolio where the work fills the space and the interface steps back. That is the right call for a creative studio, because the site is judged as design. The lesson for visibility is that the interface can recede while the text stays: project names, what the studio did, and who it was for.
Bhumi & Bloom is four businesses under one name: a regenerative farm, a floral studio, a micro-wedding venue and a workshop program. Photos of flowers, produce and land carry the story. But the spray-free, regenerative practices had to read as the differentiator, which means they had to be written down, in a clear hierarchy. An assistant cannot infer a farming method from a field of tulips.
In Living Color Painters leads with completed jobs, because real work is the strongest trust signal in the trades. Services are laid out so a homeowner can spot their job in seconds. That same clarity is what lets an assistant match the company to a question.
Does fast image loading matter for AI search too?
Yes, and for a practical reason. Heavy images slow pages down, and slow pages lose people before the words ever matter.
Fresh Snow Studio is a good example of the tradeoff. Large creative assets are the whole point of the site, so loading and image handling had to be tuned to keep it fast without shrinking the work.
Do the same. Resize images to the size they are displayed. Use modern formats. Load the ones below the fold later. And do not let a slider hide your text behind a script that takes forever to run.
Not sure where you stand? Run the speed test and look at what your images are costing you.
How do you keep your services and location in plain text?
This is where photo-heavy sites fail most often.
The service list is a graphic. The tagline with the city is part of a hero image. The service area is a map picture with no words around it. To an assistant, none of it exists.
Fix it with a checklist:
- Every service you sell appears as real text, with its own heading
- Your city and the surrounding areas you serve are written out in sentences
- Your name, address and phone number are text, not an image
- Anything important in a banner image is repeated in the copy beneath it
If you can select the words with your cursor, a machine can read them. If you cannot, it cannot.
How do you test what an assistant says about your site?
Ask it. This takes ten minutes and tells you more than most audits.
Open ChatGPT and Google's AI answers. Ask the questions a customer would ask, in a customer's words. "Who paints interiors in Raleigh?" "Where can I find a local florist for a small wedding in the Triangle?" Then name your business and ask what it does.
Look for three things:
- Does it mention you at all?
- Does it describe what you do correctly?
- Does it get your location and services right?
Wrong or missing answers point to missing text. Add it, then ask again in a few weeks. If you want a second pair of eyes, our SEO and analytics work covers exactly this.
Your next step
Pick your single best gallery today. Write the three-sentence summary, add a caption to its best image, and read your services page with images turned off. Whatever disappears is what an assistant is missing.