Meta description

The meta description is a short summary of a page declared in a meta tag. It is not a direct ranking factor, Google has said so repeatedly, but it often becomes the snippet shown beneath the title link in the results, which makes it a click-through lever. A clear, specific description that previews the value of the page earns more clicks than a generic one or an auto-generated fragment.

Google uses the meta description as a candidate for the snippet but frequently generates its own from the page content when it judges that a better match for the query, so a page may show different snippets for different queries regardless of what you wrote. The practical stance is to write a useful, accurate description in the 150 to 160 character range as a strong default, while accepting that Google may override it.

The common errors are missing descriptions (which leaves the snippet entirely to Google), duplicate descriptions across pages, and descriptions that oversell and mismatch the content, which can hurt both click-through quality and trust. For most sites, writing a unique description for the important pages and letting Google generate snippets for the long tail is a reasonable allocation of effort. We check presence, length, and uniqueness.