Meta description checker
Check if the meta description tag exists on your page, meets length recommendations, and doesn't duplicate the title
Check results
This check only covers the meta description. For a full picture of your page, run a page audit.
For issues across your whole site — duplicate titles, orphan pages, broken internal links — run a site audit.
Want us to fix what we found? Our team can help.
What is a meta description and why it matters
The meta description — <meta name="description" content="…"> in <head> — is a short summary of the page that Google often displays as the snippet below the title in search results. It's not a ranking factor directly, but it's a CTR factor: a relevant, well-written description earns more clicks than an auto-generated fallback. Unlike the title tag, meta description is optional per the HTML spec and Google explicitly says it will generate a snippet from page content when description is missing. Writing one gives you control; skipping it cedes that control to Google's auto-summariser.
What this tool checks
- Tag presence — whether
<meta name="description">exists (missing is attention, not bad — the tag is optional) - Count — there should be exactly one meta description tag
- Non-empty content — an empty description is worse than no description
- Character encoding — detects
U+FFFDgarbled characters signalling encoding bugs - Length: minimum 120 characters — very short descriptions rarely survive Google's auto-rewrite
- Length: pixel width — Google truncates around ~920px on desktop (narrower on mobile); "IIII" and "WWWW" take different space even at equal character counts
- Placeholder detection — generic text like "Description", "Welcome", or the bare domain name
- ALL-CAPS — uppercase-only descriptions look spammy in SERPs
- Keyword stuffing — repetition of the same word three or more times
- Comparison with title — description and title should complement each other, not repeat
What makes a good description
- Fits the SERP pixel limit (~920px desktop, ~680px mobile) — not character count, which misleads
- Contains the main page keyword — Google bolds matching query terms in the snippet
- Expands on or complements the title rather than repeats it
- Unique per page — duplicate descriptions across pages often get skipped by Google
- Reads like a mini-ad: a clear value proposition with a reason to click
- Uses standard capitalization (not ALL CAPS)
Good vs bad examples
Good — specific, keyword-led, under the pixel limit:
<meta name="description" content="Free SEO audit tool that runs 28 checks in seconds: title, description, canonical, Open Graph, SSL, and more. No signup required.">Good — missing description is acceptable for sites that want Google to generate per-query snippets (e.g. large e-commerce catalogues or forum posts):
<!-- no meta description -->Bad — empty description (tag declared but says nothing; worse than omitting it):
<meta name="description" content="">Bad — placeholder left from the CMS default:
<meta name="description" content="Site description">Bad — keyword stuffing, looks spammy and may be replaced by Google:
<meta name="description" content="Cheap cars, buy cars, cars for sale, car deals, cars near me">Bad — too wide for SERP; the hook gets cut off with an ellipsis on mobile:
<meta name="description" content="Welcome to our website where we write about many different topics including SEO, marketing, web development, design, analytics, and various other subjects relevant to digital business in 2026.">Common mistakes
- Same description across many pages — Google often ignores description entirely on duplicates and builds its own snippet
- Description matches the title — wastes an opportunity to give users additional context
- Measuring length in characters, not pixels — "MMM" and "iii" are the same three characters but take very different space
- ALL CAPS — reads as shouting, reduces CTR
- Keyword stuffing — Google rewrites descriptions it considers over-optimized
- Promises that the page doesn't deliver — Google may swap the description for a page snippet if it considers yours misleading
- Cut-off sentences — if you go over the limit, make sure the first half stands on its own