Add a meta description tag - MetricSpot docs

What this check does

Looks for <meta name="description" content="…"> in the page <head> and verifies the content is non-empty. The check fails when the tag is missing, empty, or contains only whitespace.

This is the presence check. The companion Meta description length check verifies the description sits in the optimal 130–155 character window.

Why it matters

Meta description doesn’t directly affect rank, but it dramatically affects whether anyone clicks.

The snippet under your search result. Google displays the meta description verbatim ~30% of the time and auto-generates from page content the other 70%. Auto-generation often picks the worst possible sentence — boilerplate, a TOC entry, a cookie banner.
AI Overviews and answer cards. Google’s AI features, Perplexity, ChatGPT browse mode — they all read meta description as a high-confidence summary of the page. A missing description leaves them guessing.
Social shares. When the page doesn’t have Open Graph og:description, most platforms fall back to the meta description. (You should set og:description separately — see Open Graph core tags.)

A page with no description forfeits the most-edited line of marketing copy on the entire site.

How to fix it

Write a 130–155 character description that answers “why should someone click this?” Put it in the <head>:

<meta name="description" content="See what AI agents and Google see on your site. 91 checks, no signup. Free audit at metricspot.com.">

Per-page descriptions matter more than a sitewide default. A homepage description that’s also on every blog post is worse than no description — Google flags it as duplicate, and the snippet is unhelpful on every page.

Astro:

---
const { description } = Astro.props;
---
<meta name="description" content={description} />

Then pass description from each page’s frontmatter.

Next.js (App Router):

export const metadata = {
  description: "What this page is about, in 130–155 characters.",
};

WordPress — Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and SEOPress all expose a per-post description field. Set defaults, then override for high-traffic pages with hand-tuned copy.

What to write.

Answer first. “Audit any site in 60 seconds” beats “We’re a platform that helps you understand your site’s performance.”
Include the user’s query terms when possible. Google bolds matching terms in the snippet, which lifts CTR.
One sentence is fine. Two is the ceiling. Three is too many.
No keyword stuffing. Google detects spammy descriptions and rewrites them.

Audit yourself:

curl -s https://yourdomain.com/ | grep -o '<meta name="description"[^>]*>'

If there’s no output, the tag is missing.

Frequently asked questions

How long should the description be?

Sweet spot is 130–155 characters. Google truncates at roughly 155–160 chars on desktop and ~120 on mobile. Anything shorter than 70 chars usually means you have more to say. See Meta description length for the detailed length rules.

Does meta description affect rankings?

Not directly — Google stated in 2009 that meta description is not a ranking signal, and that’s still true. But it strongly affects click-through, and CTR is a ranking signal indirectly via Quality Rater feedback and re-ranking. Skipping the description is leaving CTR on the table.

What if Google rewrites my description anyway?

Google ignores your description and synthesizes one from the page when (a) your description doesn’t match the query, (b) it’s stuffed with keywords, or (c) it’s identical across many pages. Write a query-specific, honest description and Google uses it most of the time.