Field Guide
Meta Descriptions
A meta description is the short summary that appears beneath your page's title in search results — it doesn't directly affect your ranking, but it's the pitch that decides whether someone clicks your result or the next one.
Why it matters for your site
Two pages can rank side by side and one gets all the clicks. The difference is often the description — the few lines that tell a searcher 'this is exactly what you're looking for'. A compelling description earns the click; a missing one leaves it to chance.
The meta description is not a ranking factor — Google has been explicit about this. But click-through rate matters for the traffic you actually receive, and the description is the one piece of search-result copy you fully control. Treating it as a small ad for the page is the right instinct.
When you don't provide one, Google writes its own by pulling a sentence or two from the page. Sometimes that's fine; often it's a disjointed fragment that reads like it was assembled by a machine, because it was. Writing your own gives the searcher a reason to choose you.
How to check it yourself
- Search Google for your page and read the grey text under the blue headline. That's your description — or Google's guess at one.
- View the page source and look for <meta name="description"> inside the <head>. If it's absent, you're leaving the snippet entirely to Google.
- Write a description that summarises the page and includes a reason to click — a benefit, a specific, an answer to the question the searcher is asking.
- Keep each one unique to the page and let it stand on its own — it may be read with no other context.
- The Kweri audit flags missing descriptions and ones outside the readable length range in the Technical SEO section of your report.
Technical detail
The description is set with a <meta name="description" content="..."> tag in the page's <head>. It has no effect on the page itself — it exists purely for search engines and other tools that generate previews (including social shares, though those often use Open Graph tags instead).
Around 150–160 characters typically displays in full on desktop; mobile shows less. Beyond that, the snippet is truncated with an ellipsis. Front-load the most important part so it survives truncation.
Google substitutes its own snippet when it judges yours to be a poor match for the search query — so a description won't always appear verbatim. It's a strong default, not a guarantee.
For the primary specification and guidance, see Google — Control your snippets in search results →
Related
The language, offer, and visual tone of the source a user arrived from (ad, email, search result, social post) must be immediately echoed on the landing page — a mismatch destroys the scent trail and causes instant abandonment.
Plain, direct language is understood faster and trusted more — jargon and complexity are barriers.
See Meta Descriptions on your own site
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