Does Google Search Use ARIA?

Google Search likely does not use ARIA Accessible Rich Internet Applications, for ranking or even indexing purposes, according to both John Mueller and Martin Splitt at Google.

ARIA is a set of attributes you can add to HTML elements that define ways to make web content and applications accessible to users with disabilities who use assistive technologies (AT).

This topic has come up LinkedIn. Here is what Googlers had to say about it:

John Mueller wrote:

Looking through I could only imagine aria-label potentially being useful for indexing, and I don’t see that happening when I try – so my assumption would be that we don’t use these for search. I don’t think they’d affect crawling or indexing otherwise, since they’re attributes on links, and don’t replace them. (That said, this is from a 5 minute dig into this … happy to hear more!)

Martin Splitt wrote:

As far as I remember, we didn’t use them a few years ago. I don’t know if that changed from the top of my head right now, but I wouldn’t rely on ARIA. That’s also a general guiding principle around ARIA – don’t use it *instead* of the other ways to convey information. Adding it for accessibility is never a bad idea, tho.

Previously Martin Splitt said, “Why slap aria on something that has a better, semantic alternative… And citing seo myths as a justification… Noooo.”

There is also an Google SEO office hours from the past where John Mueller addressed it:

John: Michał asks: Does Google see and consider ARIA-label name and other ARIA label accessibility attributes? Does setting ARIA attributes improve SEO?

There’s no inherent SEO advantage to making a website look like it has accessibility features. Instead, use accessibility features for accessibility reasons. There are enough users that rely on these features to make it worthwhile, even without any direct SEO effect. Instead of artificially using accessibility features like ARIA-labels, use them properly.

In short, I wouldn’t use ARIA labels to boost your SEO, it is not for that.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Simchat Torah.