What is a meta description?
It's the two lines of ad copy Google can show under your page title — and it's missing on nearly every small-business site we audit. Flagged as an error on 27 of the 28 real audits in our report corpus, it's the single most common finding we generate. Check in 30 seconds: right-click any page, choose View page source, and search for meta name="description". Nothing there? Google writes the snippet for you — and it usually doesn't sell.
The audit checks this on every page it crawls — up to 25 pages — and names every offender in the report.
The definition, in plain English
<meta name="description" content="…"> — that offers search engines a 120–160 character summary to display under your listing in results. It doesn't change where you rank; it changes whether anyone clicks. When the tag is missing, Google auto-generates a snippet from random page text — often a navigation string, a cookie notice, or a sentence out of context — so the one thing a searcher reads before choosing you is written by an algorithm having a bad day. Google may still rewrite a good description, but a good one is your only shot at controlling it; a missing one is a guaranteed loss of control.
What our engine actually checks
Rule core/meta-description · severity: error · flagged on 27 of the 28 real audits behind our statistics page
The audit engine checks every crawled page — up to 25 per site — for a description meta tag and validates its length. A page fails if the tag is missing entirely, or if it is far outside the useful 120–160 character window (an empty tag, or a 400-character essay that Google will truncate anyway). Findings come back per page with the URL list, so a template problem — for example every blog post missing the tag — shows up as one finding covering many pages.
In the corpus this is the number-one finding overall: 27 of the 28 audited sites had at least one page without a usable description, and it counts as an error, not a warning — it's the only SEO basic our engine treats as broken-by-default.
Why it matters, honestly sized
Nothing on this list loses you rankings by itself — descriptions are not a ranking factor. What it costs is clicks on the rankings you already have. When your page appears for a search, the searcher sees the title plus two lines of snippet text; a hand-written description that matches the search and ends in a reason to click reliably outperforms an auto-generated fragment. On a page ranking position 3–7, click-through rate is often the only lever you have.
It also costs you control elsewhere: Facebook, LinkedIn and WhatsApp frequently fall back to the meta description when Open Graph description tags are missing — so the same hole degrades your social shares too.
The fix, step by step
- Write one per important page. 120–160 characters: what the page offers, for whom, and one concrete reason to click ("Free quote in 24 hours", "Same-day repair"). Front-load the words your customers actually search.
- Make each unique. Copy-pasted descriptions across pages get treated as boilerplate; unique ones let each page sell its own query.
- Put the tag in the page head:
<meta name="description" content="Your 160-character summary.">— on most site builders (WordPress with an SEO plugin, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify) there's a "SEO description" or "meta description" field per page; fill that and the tag appears. - Don't sweat exact length. Google truncates around 155–160 characters on desktop and less on mobile; the first 120 characters carry the message.
- Verify with view-source on a handful of templates — home, a service page, a blog post — since one template bug can blank hundreds of pages at once.
What the £7.99 report checks — and what it can't
Everything here that can be checked from outside your site is mechanical, and mechanical is checkable. Full disclosure: some of it isn't, and we say which. The report is the full 21-category audit — what it costs and how it compares to doing it yourself are on their own pages.
The mechanical half
Checked across up to 25 pages per audit, with every offending page named and the exact fix spelled out.
- meta description presence on every audited page
- description length against the 120–160 character window
- duplicate descriptions shared across pages
- the other head-tag basics in the same pass: title tags and H1s
— Not ours to claim
What no report sold from outside your site can do:
- Descriptions are checked as written text — the report can't judge how persuasively a description sells, and it doesn't predict Google's rewriting. What it guarantees: no page of yours ships without a usable description again.
Fair questions, straight answers
Does the meta description affect Google rankings?
Not directly — Google has said for over a decade that description text is not a ranking factor. Its effect is on click-through rate: a compelling snippet wins the click over a random auto-generated one at the same position. Indirectly, better click-through can help over time, but the honest framing is: it's a conversion element, not a ranking element.
Why is my meta description showing something else in Google?
Google rewrites descriptions when it believes another part of the page matches the searcher's query better — often pulling a sentence containing the exact search words. You can't stop this entirely; a specific, query-relevant description reduces how often it happens. What you're fixing by adding the tag is the worst case: no snippet control at all.
What's the ideal meta description length?
Around 120–160 characters. Google truncates around 155–160 on desktop, less on mobile, so the first sentence should carry the pitch on its own. Shorter than ~70 characters wastes the space; longer than ~160 gets cut mid-word.
Should every page have one?
Every page you want found in search, yes. Google itself generates descriptions for large sites where writing them all isn't practical, and for those the auto-snippet is acceptable. But your homepage, service pages, and money pages — the ones that compete for clicks — should each have a hand-written one. In our corpus, 27 of 28 sites were missing at least one; the average wasn't a blog post, it was the pages that matter.
Find out what your snippets say about you.
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with meta descriptions, titles and H1s checked page by page across your whole site.