Meta description checker

A meta description is not a ranking factor. It is the sentence under your title that decides whether someone clicks. Leaving it blank hands that sentence to the search engine.

What we measure

We read <meta name="description"> and flag missing, under 50 or over 160 characters. Those are display bounds, not scoring magic — a 40-character line is usually too thin to sell the click.

How to write one

State what the page is and why it is worth opening. Include the main term once if it reads naturally. Do not stuff keywords or repeat the title verbatim.

One description per URL. A site-wide boilerplate (“Welcome to our website”) is worse than none: it looks identical on every result.

Why 50 to 160 characters

The description is the sentence under the headline in the result. Search engines show roughly 155–160 characters on desktop and fewer on mobile, and when the tag is missing or off-topic they build their own snippet from the page text. Under 50 characters the line rarely gives a reason to click; over 160 it is cut mid-sentence. These are display bounds — the checker flags them so you decide, it does not lower the score for a 165-character line that reads well.

It reads the first <meta name="description"> in the HTML that came back from the fetch. Descriptions set by JavaScript after load are not seen by the first crawl and are not seen here.

Common mistakes

Leaving it empty on the pages that get the most impressions, because they were built from a template. Copying the first paragraph verbatim (the snippet then repeats what the reader will see anyway). Stuffing four variants of the term into one sentence, which reads like a listing and clicks like one.

What the audit of https://example.com/ returned on 5 September 2026

As found

<!-- no <meta name="description"> in <head> → meta_description_missing (error) -->

Fixed

<meta name="description" content="Example Domain is reserved for documentation and tests: you can use example.com in manuals and code without asking permission." />
<!-- 139 characters: what the page is, why it exists, and who it is for -->

The search engine will write its own snippet for example.com from the two sentences on the page. That is fine for a reserved domain; for a product page it means the sentence that sells the click is chosen by someone else.

Questions

Does the meta description affect ranking?

Not directly. It affects the click-through rate of the result, which is the number that turns impressions into visits. A page can rank and still lose the click to a neighbour with a clearer line.

Can I use the same description on similar pages?

Each URL should have its own. Identical descriptions make near-duplicate results, and the engine tends to replace them with page text, so the work is lost anyway.

Why does the result show a different text than my tag?

The engine chose page text it judged more relevant to that query. Usually the tag was generic, too short, or did not mention what the searcher typed.

See the full audit in your workspace