What is Meta description?

A meta description is a short summary of a page placed in a meta tag in the HTML head. Visitors never see it on the page itself. It exists for search engines and link previews, which may show it as the gray snippet text below your title link.

<meta name="description" content="We tested 14 waterproof hiking boots on wet trails. Sizes 5–12, free returns for 60 days and same-day dispatch.">

Does it affect rankings?

Not directly — Google has said for years that the meta description isn’t a ranking factor. Its value is in clicks: a specific, honest description makes your result more attractive than the one next to it, and clicks are where traffic comes from.

Google’s snippet documentation says it uses the meta description when it describes the page more accurately than on-page text. In practice, Google often builds its own snippet from the body when the query matches a different passage. That isn’t a penalty; your description simply didn’t answer that particular query.

Length

Snippets are cut by pixel width: about 920 px on desktop and about 680 px on mobile. That works out to roughly 150–160 characters on desktop and noticeably fewer on phones, so put the most useful information first.

Writing a good one

• Describe this specific page — products, numbers, place, price range, what makes it different.
• Match the search intent: a guide promises an answer, a product page promises stock and delivery.
• Use the main phrase naturally; Google bolds words that match the query.
• Give a reason to click: free, no signup, updated this year, a concrete result.

Common mistakes

• One description copied across the whole site or an entire category.
• Keyword strings or tag lists instead of sentences.
• Promises the page doesn’t keep, which hurts trust after the click.
• Forgetting that nosnippet or max-snippet:0 in the robots meta tag suppress snippets entirely — in classic results and as a source for AI Overviews.
• Still filling in meta keywords. Google ignores that tag, and it shows competitors your target list.

Check it

The meta tags checker shows the description a live page actually serves, with its length and pixel width, alongside every other tag in the head. For drafting, the SERP preview shows desktop and mobile truncation as you type. Pair the description with a strong title tag, see how both look on the SERP, and judge success by click-through rate rather than rankings.

Frequently asked questions