Can accessibility score affect SEO?

Published Nov 29, 2025

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and accessibility have more in common than you might think. When we build websites to be accessible to humans, we are also building them to be accessible to web search crawlers like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. That might seem counter-intuitive, but it starts to make sense when you realise that a lot of accessibility best practices are about structure and metadata.

Structure

What do I mean by “accessibility best practices are about structure and metadata”? Let’s look at a simple example: headings. When you write content on a website, the content should follow a certain structure. Part of that structure is the hierarchy of headings.

Proper heading hierarchy helps humans understand the structure of the content. Look at the markup below. Each heading and subheading can be given a logical number, showing that it clearly belongs to the heading above it.

<h1>Title</h1>

<h2>Heading 1</h2>
<h3>Subheading 1.1</h3>
<h3>Subheading 1.2</h3>

<h2>Heading 2</h2>

<h2>Heading 3</h2>
<h3>Subheading 3.1</h3>

The beauty of this hierarchy is that machines can correctly determine the structure of our content as well. This is not just helpful for screen readers, but also website crawlers. Using correct heading hierarchy helps search engines extract the content that is most relevant to a given search query.

Metadata

Another important aspect of building a website is ensuring pages contain the correct metadata. This can be anything from special titles, descriptions, and images for social media platforms; to ARIA roles and attributes that make interactive content accessible for keyboard users and screen readers. One thing you might find surprising about ARIA is that its roles and attributes can also be extremely helpful for search engine crawlers.

When used correctly, ARIA roles and attributes can let search engines know what page elements are important, and what elements should be ignored. This ensures search engine users see the most relevant content from your website.

Can accessibility tools improve SEO?

In many ways, automated accessibility tools like A11y Pulse can also be beneficial to a website’s search engine optimization. By exposing potential accessibility issues across your entire site, A11y Pulse can also ensure that your pages are understood by search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.