Meta description
By BeeRanked · August 10, 2026
A meta description is a short summary of a page, stored in the page's HTML, that search engines can show as the grey snippet under your title in results. It does not affect rankings; it affects whether people click.
Does Google always show it?
No. Google states that it "primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet" and uses your meta description only "when it describes the page better than other parts of the content". A good description raises the odds that Google uses your words instead of an extracted sentence.
How to write one
Around 150 to 160 characters, so it does not get cut off mid-thought.
Unique per page. Google warns that identical descriptions across pages are not helpful.
Say what the page delivers, plainly. Include the topic words a searcher used and the concrete benefit of clicking. No keyword lists.
Never leave it empty. With nothing to work with, the snippet becomes whatever text a crawler grabbed first, often a navigation label or a cookie notice.
Meta descriptions in BeeRanked
Every page in BeeRanked has a meta title and meta description field in Content Enrichment, with a live preview of how the result will look. It is one of the fields our SEO checklist refuses to let you forget, precisely because it is the easiest high-leverage field to skip.