Missing meta description: how to find and fix it

Google writes the snippet itself, from whatever text on the page best matches the query. Sometimes that works well. Often it picks a cookie notice, a navigation label or a sentence cut off mid-thought, and the result looks worse than its neighbours.

Google says it uses the meta description when it describes the page better than the page text does. It may still rewrite it for some queries, so a description is not a guarantee. Without one, you have no say at all.

Meta descriptions do not affect ranking. What they affect is whether someone clicks, which is why the pages worth fixing first are the ones people already see in results.

A site audit usually finds this on dozens of pages at once, because it is a template problem: the blog, product or docs template has no description field, or has one that nobody fills in.

• Start with pages that have impressions in Search Console. Sort by impressions and look at click-through rate; a page ranking on page one with a weak CTR is the clearest win.
• Then templates with many pages, where one field and a sensible fallback fix every page of that type.
• Leave pages that are noindex, or canonicalised elsewhere. They do not appear in results, so their descriptions are never shown.

Add a description field to the template, and write descriptions by hand for the pages that matter. A good one says what the page gives the reader, in plain words, in one or two sentences. It is not a list of keywords.

For the long tail, a fallback beats nothing: the page's excerpt or first paragraph, trimmed at a word boundary. Do not use one site-wide description as the fallback. Every page would then share it, and the audit would flag them as duplicates instead.

Aim for 70 to 160 characters. Shorter wastes the space results give you; longer gets truncated. The free meta tag checker previews how the title and description may look in a result for one URL.