The meta description is the summary Google may show beneath your title in results. It has not been a ranking factor since 2009, and it still earns or loses clicks every day.
What it does and doesn’t do
It’s a pitch, not a signal. Google confirmed long ago that meta descriptions are not used for ranking. What they do is occupy the most persuasive space on a results page: the couple of lines telling a searcher whether your page answers their question.
Google also rewrites descriptions freely, and more often than it rewrites titles. It frequently pulls a passage from your page body when that passage matches the query better than your written summary. Published studies have put the rewrite rate above 60% and considerably higher on long-tail queries.
That rewriting behaviour is rational: your one description has to serve every query the page ranks for, while Google can tailor a snippet to each. Which reframes the job.
How to write one that survives
- Around 150 to 160 characters. Everything past that gets truncated, and mobile truncates earlier.
- Include the language the searcher used. Matched terms are bolded in results, which draws the eye.
- Say what the page gives them, not what the page is about. “Every confirmed Google update with exact dates” beats “a page about Google updates”.
- Give a reason to choose you over the result above. The competition is the rest of the page, not the abstract quality of your writing.
- Make it unique. Duplicated descriptions across templated pages signal interchangeable pages.
Where to spend the effort
Because Google rewrites so often, writing unique descriptions for 5,000 templated pages is rarely worth the hours. The high-return work is narrow: your top 20 to 50 pages by impressions in Search Console, where you know the queries and a better snippet compounds daily.
For everything else, a well-built template that pulls sensible content is enough, and letting Google improvise is a perfectly reasonable default.
The title tag comparison
| Title tag | Meta description | |
|---|---|---|
| Ranking factor? | Yes, directly | No, not since 2009 |
| Rewritten by Google? | About 61.6% of the time | More often than titles |
| Length that survives | Around 55 characters | Around 155 characters |
| Main job | Relevance plus the click | The click only |
| Worth writing at scale? | Yes, always | Only on pages that matter |
Common mistakes
- Leaving them empty on important pages and letting Google pick whatever sits near the top of the document.
- Keyword stuffing. There is no ranking benefit to collect and it reads badly to the human deciding whether to click.
- Writing 300 characters. Everything past roughly 160 is invisible.
- Treating a rewrite as a failure. Google’s version is often better matched to the specific query than yours could be.
- Auditing them sitewide and fixing all of them. A classic way to spend a week for no measurable return.
Related
Title tag for the headline above it, and SERP for what surrounds both.