While working on ZIDOOKA! recently, there was something I quietly wondered about. I’ve always added screenshots whenever I ran into errors—mostly because they were my own “evidence” of what happened. But one day I began to think: Do AI systems and search engines actually know these images are screenshots?
It turns out they do. And not just in a shallow way.
Modern AI can understand the structure of a screenshot: the UI elements, OS-specific window frames, system fonts, browser layout, error dialog design, even the exact error message text inside the image. In other words, AI can confidently determine “this is a real screenshot taken during an actual error.”
This surprised me more than I expected.
Looking back, I always attached screenshots simply because I wanted other users to recognize the situation easily—“Hey, this is the exact screen I saw. Anyone else having this issue?” But that simple habit was actually boosting ZIDOOKA!’s EEAT without me noticing. The AI reads the text via OCR, analyzes the UI layout, and treats the screenshot as a strong signal of authenticity and first-hand experience.
One of the most surprising findings was that English error messages inside screenshots were being indexed naturally. ChatGPT, Copilot, and WordPress error messages appearing only inside an image were still triggering impressions in Search Console. The English version of each article amplified this effect even more.
In short, the structure of ZIDOOKA!—full of real-world screenshots and firsthand troubleshooting—was already optimized for modern search engines. I had no idea that AI understood screenshots this deeply, but this “surprising discovery” made me realize the strength of the style I’ve been building from the start.
References (Raw URLs)
- Google Vision AI
https://cloud.google.com/vision - Google Search Central: Image Guidelines
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/images - OCR Technology Overview
https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/ocr