BON SEO Overwrote My Product Image Alt Text on Shopify — How to Recover It
BON SEO includes bulk image alt-text optimization, and running it can replace the alt text you wrote by hand with a generated template (often the product or variant name) across every image at once. Image alt text is stored per media on each product, and Shopify keeps no version history of it — so once a bulk run overwrites it, there is no saved copy of your originals and no native undo. A single optimization pass can flatten descriptive, accessibility-friendly alt text store-wide with nothing to restore from.
If you didn't already have a backup, those old values are gone — Shopify keeps no history.
The steps below recover what you can. To make the next time a 1-click undo instead of hours of CSV work: a daily snapshot of every SEO field. Free to monitor, no card — and SEO Vault only reads your store unless you click restore.
Stop BON from re-applying first. In BON SEO, turn off any auto or scheduled alt-text optimization and don't run another bulk alt-text pass — otherwise it overwrites your fixes again on the next run. Confirm the same setting isn't also templating collection-image or variant alt text, not just main product images.
Recover your originals. Re-import alt text from a pre-change export — Matrixify maps the 'Image Alt Text' column back to each product's media; if you have no export, the Wayback Machine's archived product pages (view source, read each <img alt="...">) can recover alt text for your most important products.
Rewrite what's truly lost, by priority. Alt text mainly drives Google Images and accessibility, so start with the hero/main image on your top products — write short, unique, descriptive alt per image rather than the bare product name, which also helps those URLs re-rank in image search. Then request re-indexing of those product pages.
Going forward, keep a daily snapshot of alt text for products AND collections, so a single BON SEO run is flagged the day it happens, with the likely app named, and yesterday's alt text restores in one click instead of being rewritten image by image.
Source: BON SEO app listing (bulk image alt-text optimization feature); Shopify Help Center: adding and editing alt text for product images (help.shopify.com); Google Search Central image SEO best practices (unique, descriptive alt text).
SEO Vault keeps a daily snapshot of every SEO field on your store — meta titles, descriptions, alt-text, tags, handles (products AND collections) — and emails you the moment something changes in bulk, with the likely app responsible. One click restores yesterday's state, just the SEO fields. Free to monitor and get alerted; $14/mo for 1-click restore.