Malaysian chess organisers love flyers. tournaments distributed via image-only flyers and that's a problem : Search engine indexing and overall event visibility.

The core problem is real. When organisers post tournament information exclusively as graphic flyers—JPEG or PNG files—the text inside those images is not treated the same as HTML text on a webpage. A search for "catur terbuka Selangor 2026" or "rapid chess Kuala Lumpur July 2026" will not retrieve that tournament through a standard web search unless the information is also published in crawlable, indexable form.

One would argue that Google Gemini can do OCR easily meaning Google has developed limited ability to read text embedded in images using its Gemini architecture, and there is documented evidence that character recognition is applied to some images. However, this capability remains inconsistent, unreliable for tournament discoverability, and carries less ranking weight than proper HTML text. The SEO community strongly advises against relying on it.

The problem is compounded by where Malaysian chess flyers are typically shared. WhatsApp messages and group chats remain entirely private and are never indexed by any search engine. While Facebook has allowed Google indexing of public posts from brands and creators since July 2025, this applies primarily to post captions—not to text inside flyer images. Without a text caption, the flyer itself remains effectively invisible.

So the solution is simple. Duplicate the information in the flyer as plain text also.

Plain text ensures full, reliable indexing by every search engine, every time. Beyond searchability, it provides additional benefits: accessibility for screen readers, the ability to copy-paste dates and addresses, machine translation, direct linking to specific details.

The flyer should remain for its visual appeal. The text is for the machines. This is best practice not only for Malaysian chess but for any community organisation seeking to make its events discoverable.

One positive here is websites like Catur Malaysia takes the trouble to make sure that there are text description information despite organisers only giving graphics flyer. This ensures that the particular tournament will be index by search engines like Google and be found more easily. Catur Malaysia should be commended based on this fact alone.