The two lines under your result, checked before Google writes them for you.
Free · no signup · reviewed
Free, no signup. We fetch the page live and read what a search engine would see.
A meta description doesn't affect rankings. It affects whether the ranking is worth anything, because it is the sales copy under your link. When it is missing, Google composes one from the page — sometimes the opening sentence, sometimes the cookie banner, sometimes a fragment of navigation.
This checks whether the page has one, whether it will survive truncation, whether the tag is present but empty (which looks deliberate and does nothing), and whether it reads like something written for a person or generated by a plugin.
Truncation is measured in pixels, roughly 920 on desktop and less on mobile, which works out at about 155 characters in most fonts. Everything past that is cut with an ellipsis, so the first sentence has to carry the offer on its own.
Click-through rate is the one search metric you control entirely from the results page. A page sitting at position four with a description written for the person searching can out-earn position two with none — and rewriting a description costs ten minutes and no development time.
Roughly 120 to 155 characters. One per page, written for the person searching, naming the thing they typed and what they get by clicking. Different on every page you want traffic on.
Each of these has a full entry in our issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
No summary text for the search result snippet.
The same summary text is reused across pages.
A checker that hands you a list and walks away has done half the job. Here is what each kind of finding means and what it is worth doing about it.
Some themes output a description tag with nothing in it. It looks correct in a dashboard, stops nothing, and leaves Google composing your snippet. Both count as missing here because the fix is identical.
Nothing is penalised for length. The tail is simply cut, so check what survives: if your call to action is the last four words, it is not being read. Move it to the front.
Sixty characters where you could have a hundred and fifty is free advertising space you declined. The exception is a page where the title already says everything, which is rarer than people think.
One description reused site-wide makes every result look identical, which reads as a site nobody maintains. It comes from a pattern with too few variables in it, so the fix belongs in the template rather than on the page.
Google has said repeatedly that it is not a ranking factor, and no amount of keyword placement changes that. It earns clicks, which is a different and often more valuable thing.
"This page contains information about our roofing services" tells a searcher nothing they can act on. "Flat roof repairs across Leeds, usually fixed within 48 hours — free survey and a fixed quote" does.
Bolding happens automatically when the words match the query, which is worth one natural mention. Beyond that you are spending the space that should be doing the selling.
Ten thousand hand-written product descriptions is not a project anyone finishes. Use a pattern built from real fields for the long tail, and write by hand for the pages that earn the money.
The setting is in a different place on every platform, and that is usually what stands between knowing and fixing.
Set a description template per post type in your SEO plugin — product name, category and a benefit line reads far better than a static sentence — then override it on the pages with real traffic.
The search engine listing field on each product and collection holds the description. A theme that falls back to the product description usually produces a truncated paragraph of supplier copy, which is worse than a short written one.
Bind the meta description on a collection template to a dedicated short field rather than to the body text. Using the first 155 characters of an article almost always gives you a sentence that reads as an offcut.
Each page's SEO panel holds the description. Blog posts fall back to an excerpt, which is worth writing deliberately for exactly this reason.
Return description from generateMetadata per route. Composing it from real data — a product's category, price band and availability — beats both a static string and a slice of body copy.
More on your platform: SEO audits by platform.
The one tag that decides whether anyone clicks your result.
Every tag in the head of your page, read back to you the way a crawler sees it.
Score one page against the checks that actually move rankings.
Or see all ten free tools.