Meta description – what it is and how to write one that actually gets clicked

Definition

A meta description is the short text summary of a web page shown under the page title in the search results. It acts as an ad for the page – it decides whether the user clicks or scrolls past.

Does the meta description affect rankings?

No – the meta description is not a direct ranking factor. Google has officially confirmed this, and independent SEO studies back it up. But it affects how many people click on your result – and that is where the value lies. Google has not confirmed that a higher CTR in itself raises rankings.

Search terms that match the text of the meta description are also shown in bold in the search result, which makes the result more visible and signals relevance to the user.

How long should a meta description be?

Google shows meta descriptions up to roughly 160 characters on desktop and about 120 characters on mobile. Longer descriptions are truncated with "…". If the meta description is empty, Google picks a snippet of text from the page itself – rarely the most persuasive option.

An effective meta description:

• Includes the primary keyword naturally (Google highlights matching terms in bold in the results list)
• Communicates a clear value proposition or answers the underlying question directly
• Ends with an implicit or explicit call to action: "Read the guide", "Compare the options", "See how it works"
• Is unique to each page – never copied from another page on the website

Google rewrites meta descriptions – why?

According to a 2020 study by Ahrefs (20,000 keywords, desktop), Google rewrote the meta descriptions in roughly 63% of cases. This happens when Google judges that an automatically generated summary of the page's content matches the search query better than the description you wrote.

The best insurance against Google picking something worse is clearly structured page content, with answers early in the text. Always write a good meta description – but there is no guarantee it will be shown.

The meta description in an AI context

As AI Overviews take up more and more space in the search results, the role of the meta description is shifting. On searches that show an AI Overview, individual pages get fewer clicks, so the meta description plays a less direct role in traffic. But for commercial and transactional searches, where AI Overviews rarely appear, it is still decisive for CTR and conversion.

Read more about how AI is changing visibility in search in AI Overviews and GEO: how your company appears in Google's AI answers.

The HTML implementation

The meta description is written as an HTML meta tag in the page's <head>:

<meta name="description" content="Your description here.">

Most CMS platforms have a field where you can enter the meta description without touching the code.