It was a fad that we all remember too well from the MSN Messenger days: we’d login only to spend hours talking to SmarterChild, the intelligent bot developed to keep you company and chat about unimportant things. Although companies have continued to spend billions of dollars on artificial intelligence, most have kept pretty quiet about spending money on developing online chatbots (with a few notable exceptions). Both Facebook and Microsoft have recently expressed an interested in using online chatbots for both customer service and entertainment.

Last month Microsoft debuted the abysmal Tay– a Twitter bot that chatted with users and grew smarter with continued interaction. Within 24 hours of learning user behaviour, Tay became vulgar and racist, repeating many of the things users were saying to her online. Tay became short-lived, with Microsoft pulling the plug on the project shortly after. Today Microsoft debuted CaptionBot, it’s newest AI experiment. In CaptionBot users can upload a photo and it generates a caption based on what the algorithm can find. Rating how accurately the caption was (in theory) will make CaptionBot learn how to better caption photos.

With the growing number of AI bots fishing for information, SEO and naming conventions are more important than ever. CaptionBot uses part of the Bing Image Search API to return results, and Facebook’s planned customer service bots will return information likely sourced from the net. Image optimization has always been an important part of SEO; creating the proper naming conventions and imbedding proper tags into photos has always been key in proper image optimization. If bots are creating image captions based on what information they have, your SEO optimization for your images needs to be key to ensure these bots will give the right information. Qode Media has a few tips on properly optimizing your photos:

1. Properly name your images- don’t upload images with random letters or numbers as the title.
2. Carefully create alternate tags for your images. Adding proper tags will not only help both the image and your website rank.
3. Have multiple images for products and tag them accordingly. If you have an interior and exterior image of a car, tag them as such.
4. Reduce your file sizes- images with smaller file sizes tend to rank better.
5. If you have some fancy script to load images, chances are they’re not being ranked. Use Google’s image sitemap to list any images so web crawlers can find them.

So, how will AI captions and image identification affect SEO? Will CaptionBot’s image descriptions influence any changes to the Bing image search results? What are your thoughts? Optimizing your website and images can be tough. Our tips can definitely help in optimizing your site but if you’re looking to receive the best SEO services Qode Media is the solution. We’re the best SEO and Internet marketing company in Toronto, providing low-cost SEO services. Contact one of our Qode Media representatives today by using our online form or by giving us a call at 416-208-0157.