A meta description is not a ranking factor and never has been. It is the two lines under the title in the result, and it is the last thing a searcher reads before deciding whether to click. When Google rewrites it, that is Google deciding your text did not answer the query as well as a passage from the page would have.
So the target is not 'a description'. It is a description that answers the query better than any sentence on the page, for the queries the page actually gets. That is a smaller, harder job than filling in a field, and it is why most sites' descriptions are either missing, duplicated from a template, or ignored.
The steps
- Find out what queries the page getsSearch Console, Performance, filter to the page, read the Queries tab. The description should answer the top two or three, not the topic you imagined the page was about when you wrote it.
- Put the answer in the first sentenceNot the question, not a preamble. If the page is about fixing duplicate titles, the description starts with how you fix them. Google truncates around 155 characters on desktop and earlier on mobile, so the first clause carries everything.
- Stay between 120 and 155 charactersShorter leaves the space empty; longer gets cut mid-sentence. This site holds its own to 70–160 by test, and our crawler reports outside those bounds on yours.
- Make it different from the title and from every other pageA description that repeats the title wastes the space. One shared by forty pages tells Google the pages are interchangeable, which is the duplicate-content signal in miniature. For templated pages, put the distinguishing fields — the product, the location, the date — in the sentence, not just in the slot.
- Measure by click-through rate, per page, over four weeksThe description changes nothing about position. If it worked, click-through rate on the same impressions rose. Compare the rewritten pages against similar pages you left alone, because CTR moves seasonally on its own. The comparison is the proof; a rise without one is a guess.
Writing them at scale
For a few dozen important pages, write each one by hand against its query list. For thousands of templated pages, write the template sentence with the variable fields in it and check a sample of rendered results for ones that read badly — a product with a long name, a location with none. The rule that a description must be unique across the site is enforceable by a crawl, and it should be, because templates drift.
Do not generate them with a language model and ship the batch unread. The output is fluent and generic, which is exactly the kind of description Google replaces with a passage.
Questions people ask
Google rewrites mine anyway. Is it worth the effort?
For the pages with impressions, yes, because a rewrite is a signal the current text is not answering the query, and a better one can be kept. For pages with no impressions, no; fix why they have none first. The effort should follow the traffic.
Is a missing description worse than a bad one?
Slightly. A missing one guarantees Google composes something from the page, and it may pick a sentence you would not have chosen. A bad one is at least a choice. Neither affects ranking; both affect whether the searcher clicks, which is the only thing the description is for.
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