Meta description checker

See the meta description your page actually serves, its length, and whether it is missing entirely. The snippet decides the click after the ranking is already won.

Measuring rankings in

Runs the full audit on your live site. Your report opens in your dashboard.

What this checks

Two questions, in this order. Do you serve a description at all, and if so does the promise in it survive being trimmed to the space a phone gives it. Anything under 50 characters is not doing enough work to be worth the tag, and anything past 165 has a tail nobody will ever read. The title is reported next to it only because the pair is what somebody actually sees, never because the two are scored the same way: this one carries almost no weight in the engine and the title carries a great deal.

Why it matters

Nothing here changes where you rank. Everything here changes what the ranking is worth. Two results sitting in the same position with different sentences underneath them do not earn the same number of visits, and that difference is the only thing this tag has ever affected. Leave it empty and a search engine assembles a substitute out of whatever text sits highest in your document, which is why so many results in the wild open with a cookie banner or a skip link. The pitch a stranger reads before choosing between you and the result above you should probably not be written by an algorithm reading your consent notice.

How to read a bad result

An absent description is a warning rather than a failure, because something will always be shown. The realistic reading of a warning here is that a sentence you would have been happy to write is currently being improvised on your behalf. Put the promise in the first 120 characters and let the rest be the part that gets trimmed. And treat this as the last thing on a list rather than the first: it is worth an afternoon on the twenty pages that convert, and it is worth nothing at all on a page a crawler cannot reach.

The description is deliberately one of the lowest-weighted checks in the engine, because it does not affect ranking. The audit is what puts it in proportion: if the pages carrying your traffic are also failing something that decides whether they are found at all, the snippet is not the work.

All 36 checks, freePlans

A failing result, and what it costs

What a search engine assembles when there is no description to use. This is the first prose on the page, from a site with a cookie banner above the header.

Leaving the description blank does not mean no snippet. It means the snippet is assembled from the page, and what sits highest in the document is frequently a cookie notice, a skip link, or a navigation fragment. That assembled sentence is the pitch a stranger reads before deciding whether to click a result you already earned. This is not a ranking problem, which is exactly why it goes unfixed: the position is fine and the click rate quietly is not.

<!-- no meta description on the page -->

<!-- the first text in the document, which is what gets used -->
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How to fix it

  1. Write one sentence that makes a promise.Between 50 and 165 characters, with the promise in the first 120 because that is what survives on a phone.
  2. Treat it as ad copy for a placement you already own.Two results in the same position with different snippets do not get the same clicks. That difference is the entire value of the tag.
  3. Generate a good pattern for large catalogues.For thousands of pages, a pattern built from real attributes beats both an identical string and an empty tag.
  4. Find the duplicates.One description repeated across a section is a template problem and is worth more attention than any single page's wording.

Questions people ask

How long should a meta description be?

Between 50 and 160 characters. Google truncates on pixel width and on mobile the visible space is smaller, so the important half of the sentence should come first.

Does the meta description affect rankings?

No, not directly. It affects the click through rate, which affects how much traffic a given ranking is worth. Treat it as ad copy for a placement you already own.

Should every page have one?

Every page that matters commercially. For very large catalogues a good generated pattern beats thousands of identical strings, and beats leaving it empty on the pages that convert.

Read more on this

Written up properly, for the question a result usually raises next.

Meta description examples, scoredReal descriptions marked against the things that decide a clickRead →How to write a good meta descriptionThe method, as a prompt you can run on a page you already haveRead →

Check another dimension

More free tools in on page and content, and the rest of the set at all free tools.

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