Do infographics still help SEO in 2026? A new study of 27 infographic submission sites, 2,150 sampled posts and 470,691 Google image results says yes, but mostly in Google Images, and only on a handful of sites. Here are the findings that matter most if you publish or distribute infographics.
Images beat web search by about 2.5 to 1
When people searched a topic plus the word “infographic,” submitted posts landed in the Google Images top 10 13.7% of the time, versus 5.4% in the regular web top 10. Without the word “infographic,” the split was 10.1% to 2.8%.
Web visibility was thin overall. Only 78 of the 2,150 sampled posts (3.6%) ranked for any keyword in the keyword database, none reached its recorded top 10, and their combined modeled traffic was about 27 visits a month.
| Search | Google Images | Google web |
|---|---|---|
| Topic + “infographic” | 13.7% | 5.4% |
| Topic only | 10.1% | 2.8% |
A few sites do almost all the work
Three sites (Cool Infographics, Industry Today and eLearning Infographics) held 936 of the 1,003 top-10 web keywords measured across 24 sites, about 93%. Fourteen sites had none at all.
Link scores didn’t predict reach either. infographiclist.com and coolinfographics.com sit one point apart on link rank (53 and 52), yet one had zero top-10 web keywords and none of its sampled posts in the Images top 10, while the other had 551 keywords and 64% of posts in the Images top 10.
The submission site report card
The study graded 22 sites on how often their own posts reached the Google Images top 10:
- A (30% or more): elearninginfographics.com (87%), coolinfographics.com (64%), galleryr.org (45%), shithot.co.uk (35%)
- B (10 to 29%): industrytoday.com (21%), visualcontenting.com (10%)
- F (0%): eight sites, including infographiclist.com, infographicexpo.com and postinfographics.com
A grade measures Images visibility only. It doesn’t certify link quality, acceptance rates or value for any submission fee.
Credit and backlinks are a mixed bag
For 992 posts that credited a source, the creator’s own domain showed up in the Images top 100 more often (25.6%) than the submission post (14.1%). Both appeared 4.7% of the time, and neither did 55.5% of the time. Followed source links ranged from 98% of posts on some sites to 0% on others.
The backlink audit covered 36,321 linking domains. Seven of 25 scored sites had more than 80% of their linking domains classified as junk, and a wave of roughly 1,200 fake SEO-checker domains hit 21 of the 27 sites. A growing referring-domain count, on its own, told you very little.
What to do with this
- Publish on your own site first. Explain the findings in text and add the data behind the charts. Only about 7 of 2,050 examined posts included a data table.
- Describe the image clearly. Use a descriptive filename and title, and include “infographic” when it fits. Only 53% of posts in the study had any alt text.
- Pick placements by evidence. Check a recent post on the site: does it reach Google Images, and does it credit the creator with a working link?
- Measure Image and Web separately. Use the search-type filter in Search Console and track what actually reaches your own pages.
For all 22 site grades, the complete junk-link rankings and the full method, see the full article. Research by Jourdan Rombough of Optimization Theory, collected via DataForSEO on October 4 and 5, 2026 (Google US, English, desktop).
