GlossarySEO
What is a meta description?
Also called: meta description tag, search snippet
Definition
A meta description is an HTML tag summarizing a page, <meta name="description" content="…">. Google sometimes shows it as the snippet under a search result, but often writes its own from the page text.
Meta description, explained
The meta description doesn't affect rankings directly. Its job is to win the click. When Google uses it, it's the two lines of text under your title that explain why this result is the one to open.
Google is open about the fact that it often doesn't use it. Its snippet documentation says snippets are primarily created from the page content itself, and that it sometimes uses the meta description if that describes the page better than other parts of the content. In our experience, a specific, accurate description gets used more often for broad queries, while for very specific searches Google tends to pull the sentence on your page that matches.
There's no length limit on the tag itself. Google says snippets are truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width. Most SEOs aim for roughly 140–160 characters so the whole thing shows, and put the most important words early.
Google's advice is to make every description unique, include specific information about that page, and avoid long strings of keywords, which it says are less likely to be shown. For large database-driven sites, it's fine, and even encouraged, to generate descriptions programmatically from each page's own data, as long as they're genuinely page-specific.
You can also stop Google from showing parts of a page in snippets. data-nosnippet on an element hides that text, and the max-snippet rule limits snippet length. Most sites never need these.
A useful habit: write the description as an answer to the query you're targeting, with one concrete detail (a number, a feature, a price model) that the competing results don't mention.
Why it matters for founders
When your description is shown, it's the pitch for the click. On pages already ranking well, a sharper description alongside a better title is a quick way to get more traffic from the same position.
Example
Instead of "Welcome to Acme, the best tool for teams", a page uses "Generate a robots.txt that blocks AI training bots but keeps ChatGPT and Perplexity search. Free, no sign-up."
Common mistakes
- The same description on every page.
- Leaving it blank on important pages and hoping Google picks a good sentence.
- Keyword lists instead of sentences.
- Promising things the page doesn't have.
Sources
Checked
Related terms
- Title tagA title tag is the
<title>element in a page's HTML. Google usually uses it for the clickable headline of a search result, and it's one of the clearest signals of what the page is about. - Click-through rate (CTR)Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of impressions that turned into clicks: clicks divided by impressions. In Search Console it shows how often people who saw your result in Google chose it.
- SERPA SERP (search engine results page) is the page a search engine shows after a query: the list of links plus features like AI Overviews, featured snippets, videos, ads and "People also ask" boxes.
- Featured snippetA featured snippet is a Google result where the descriptive snippet appears first, above the link, to answer a query directly. Google picks it automatically; there's no markup that makes a page one.