The meta description is a sentence or two in a page’s <head> that describes what the page offers:
<meta name="description" content="Fresh-roasted Colombia Huila whole bean coffee with notes of caramel and red apple. Roasted to order in small batches and shipped within 48 hours.">Visitors never see it on the page. They see it in search results, in the gray snippet text below the title tag, when Google decides to use it.
Does it affect rankings?
No, not directly. Google confirmed back in 2009 that it doesn’t use the meta description as a ranking signal, and that’s still the case. Its value is indirect: a description that matches what the searcher wants can persuade more of them to click, and more clicks from the same position is pure gain in traffic.
Google rewrites most of them
Google picks the snippet it thinks best answers the specific search. Often that means pulling a sentence from the page instead of using your description. Industry studies have found Google rewrites the majority of meta descriptions it shows. Your description is more likely to be used when it closely matches the page and the query.
That doesn’t make writing them pointless. For the main searches each page targets, a good description is often the version shown. And if there’s no description at all, Google stitches one together from page text, which can be a cookie notice or a navigation label.
How to write one
- Summarize the page honestly in about 120 to 160 characters. Longer ones get cut off on desktop, and mobile shows fewer characters.
- Include the main topic, since Google bolds words matching the search.
- Give a reason to click: a price, a turnaround time, a guarantee, what’s included.
- Write a unique description for every important page.
- Avoid double quotes in the text, which can cut the description short in some HTML.
For Bean & Barrel Coffee, a product description that mentions the tasting notes, the roasting promise and the shipping time gives a coffee drinker three reasons to choose that result over a marketplace listing.
Common mistakes
- The same description on every page, often copied from the homepage
- Descriptions that are just a list of keywords
- Promising something the page doesn’t have, which leads to quick returns to Google
- Leaving the default text from a theme demo (“Just another WordPress site”)
How to check
Test any page with the free Meta Tag Checker to see its title, description and length. RankThat’s Site Audit flags missing, duplicate, too-long and too-short descriptions across the site, and on WordPress the AI fixes can draft descriptions in your SEO plugin for you to review and apply. Track the effect in your click-through rate over the following weeks.