Hi,
thanks for reaching out!
To answer your question directly: no, the plugin does not pass any post data or WooCommerce data to ChatGPT. The only things sent to OpenAI are your custom prompt and the image URL. The model only “sees” the picture. It has no context about the surrounding page, product, or article.
About the character limit: that instruction lives entirely inside the prompt, and the plugin does not truncate or post-process the response to enforce it. Unfortunately, all current LLMs (including every GPT model) are quite unreliable at respecting exact character/word counts this is a well-known limitation of how these models work, not something specific to the plugin.
I deliberately chose not to truncate the response programmatically: cutting the string at a fixed length would risk chopping a word in half and stripping the sentence of its meaning, which would defeat the purpose of having a descriptive, accessible alt text in the first place.
A few things you can try to get more consistent results:
- Be more explicit and repeat the constraint. For example: “Write an SEO-friendly alt text in English describing this image. The alt text MUST be between 80 and 125 characters. Do
not exceed 125 characters under any circumstance. Return only the alt text, no quotes, no explanation.”
- Try GPT-4o (not Mini): in my experience it follows length constraints better than the Mini/o1 variants.
- Use a range instead of a hard limit (“between 80 and 125 characters”), models tend to respect ranges better than single thresholds.
- Avoid asking for a specific number of words or sentences in addition to characters, conflicting constraints make things worse.
That said, your point about context is a good one. I’ll consider adding the option to pass some surrounding context (post title, excerpt, or product data) to the AI in a future release, which should help the model produce more relevant and on-topic alt text.
Best regards
