What a meta description actually does (and what it has never done)

Two things are true at once and people keep picking one. A meta description has no effect on where you rank — Google confirmed this in 2009 and has repeated it many times since. And it has a very large effect on whether anybody clicks, which is a different thing and, for most pages, the more valuable one.

What it is for

The meta description is the sales copy for a search result. Ten results are on the page, all of them nominally relevant. The title gets attention; the description is where you make the case that yours answers the actual question. Two pages ranking at 4 and 5 can have very different click-through rates on the strength of that alone.

It is also what most social platforms fall back on when Open Graph tags are missing, so the same text often ends up under your link in a chat app or a shared post.

Google will probably rewrite it

This is the part that surprises people. Studies consistently find Google replaces the supplied meta description for the majority of results — figures around 60–70% are typical, and the rate is higher for long-tail queries.

It is not arbitrary. Google rewrites when it thinks a passage from the page answers this specific query better than your general-purpose description does. Someone searching "how much does it weigh" gets the sentence containing the weight, not your carefully written summary of the whole product.

Which reframes the job. You are not writing text that will definitely be shown. You are writing a default that has to work for the queries where no single passage stands out — and simultaneously making sure the page contains clear, quotable sentences for the queries where one does. Both matter, and the second is a writing problem, not a meta tag problem.

Length

Google truncates by pixel width, not character count, so there is no exact limit. In practice:

• Desktop — roughly 155–160 characters before the ellipsis
• Mobile — roughly 120 characters, and mobile is most of your traffic

The practical rule: front-load the first 120 characters with what matters, and treat anything after that as a bonus that may never be read. A description whose point only arrives at character 140 has been written for the desktop minority.

Too short is its own problem. Under about 70 characters and Google is much more likely to decide you have not said enough and substitute its own.

Writing one that works

Answer the query, do not describe the page. "Learn about our range of services" tells a searcher nothing. "Same-day passport photos in Leeds, £8, no appointment" tells them whether to click.

Include the phrase they searched. Not for ranking — matched terms are shown in bold in the result, and bold text draws the eye down the page. That is a real, mechanical click-through advantage.

Be specific and be concrete. Numbers, prices, dates, constraints. "Free" and "in your browser" and "no sign-up" are the kind of details that decide a click. Vague enthusiasm is not.

Write a different one for every page. Duplicate descriptions across a site are one of the most common findings in any audit, and they are a wasted opportunity on every page that shares one. If you genuinely cannot write a distinct description for a page, that is usually a sign the page is a duplicate of another one.

Do not stuff keywords. It reads badly to a human, and a human is the entire audience for this tag. A description that lists eight variations of a phrase is a description nobody clicks.

What to actually check

Missing descriptions, duplicated descriptions and descriptions that get cut mid-word are all easy to find and easy to fix. Our meta tag analyser fetches a URL and reports what it really sends — which is often not what the CMS thinks it sends — and the SERP preview shows where the truncation will fall on desktop and mobile before you publish. The meta tag generator produces the full set, including the Open Graph and Twitter tags that most templates forget.

The tags around it

While you are in the head, three others earn their place and one does not.

Title tag — this one is a ranking factor and it is the single most important tag on the page. Around 60 characters, distinctive per page, most important words first.

Canonical — tells search engines which URL is the real one when several show the same content. Worth understanding properly; there is a separate guide.

Open Graph and Twitter Card tags — control how the page looks when it is shared. Without them the platform guesses, and it usually guesses badly.

The meta keywords tag — dead. Google stopped using it in 2009 and said so publicly. It is still in a great many templates and it does nothing at all. Leaving it in is harmless; believing it helps is not.

The summary

Write meta descriptions for the person deciding whether to click, not for an algorithm that stopped reading them fifteen years ago. Assume Google may replace yours. Make sure the page also contains sentences worth being replaced with, and you have covered both cases.