Does html5 picture tag affect SEO?

Question

I know when using <img> tag, the alt & title are using for SEO. But is <picture> tag is better for SEO with the attribute srcset? If yes how?

Answer 1

It won't have a positive effect on your SEO. For search engines, as for screen readers, the alt tag and the on-page caption are the big factors. The <picture> tag is more of a developer technique rather than an SEO technique. It is no more semantic than the <img> tag, since crawlers know that both represent an image. Furthermore, the last child of the <picture> tag is the <img> tag, to provide a fallback. Your <img> tag should still contain the alt text. The search engines will still find it.

This post, from this very message board, is worth looking at:

Does Google index images declared using 'srcset'?

Thus, it is particularly important to include that fallback <img> tag, with your preferred image, when using <picture> in your code.