Meta descriptions: how Google uses them for snippets

This guide is built from Google Search Central, mainly Control your snippets in search results, the robots meta tag specification and the list of meta tags Google supports, with notes from MDN. The headline above the snippet is covered in our guide to title tags, and for where both fit among the other basics, see SEO basics for small businesses.

Snippet and meta description

Google defines a snippet as "the description or summary part of search result on Google Search and other properties (for example, Google News)." The meta description is a tag you put in the page's <head>:

<meta name="description" content="A description of the page">

MDN calls it "a short and accurate summary of the content of the page", and Google's list of supported meta tags says that "in some situations, this description is used in the snippet shown in search results." Visitors never see it on the page itself; it exists for search results and other tools that summarise the page.

If you use a CMS such as WordPress or Wix, you may not edit HTML directly. Google notes that your CMS "might have a search engine settings page or some other mechanism to tell search engines about meta tags."

When Google uses your description

Google says "snippets are automatically created from page content" and are "designed to emphasize and preview the page content that best relates to a user's specific search." That has two consequences:

• The page text comes first. Snippets are "primarily created from the page content itself." Google uses the meta description "if it might give users a more accurate description of the page than content taken directly from the page."
• One page can have many snippets. Because the snippet follows the query, "Google Search might show different snippets for different searches." Your description may show for one search and not another.

The SEO Starter Guide puts it plainly: the snippet comes from the page, "thus you have complete control over the words that can be used to generate the snippet", and only "occasionally the snippet may be sourced from the contents of the meta description tag." As with title links, Google says it "can't manually change snippets for individual sites."

Don't confuse it with the older keywords tag. Google says <meta name="keywords"> "is not used by Google Search, and it has no effect on indexing and ranking at all."

Writing good meta descriptions

Google describes a good description as one that "generally informs and interests users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about", like "a pitch that convince the user that the page is exactly what they're looking for." Its best practices, in short:

• Unique per page. "Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in search results." Use a site-level description on the home page or other aggregation pages and page-level descriptions everywhere else.
• Prioritise if you're short of time. "At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages."
• Include real information. It doesn't have to be a sentence. Articles can list the author and date; product pages can bring together details such as price, age or manufacturer that are "scattered throughout a page."
• Generate them carefully on big sites. For database-driven sites where hand-written descriptions are impossible, Google says programmatic generation is "appropriate and are encouraged", as long as the results are "human-readable and diverse."
• No keyword lists. Descriptions "comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed as a snippet."
• No fixed length. "There's no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width." Put the useful part first.

Google also warns that because descriptions "aren't displayed in the pages the user sees, it's easy to let this content slide." The Starter Guide sums it up: "short, unique to one particular page, and includes the most relevant points of the page."

Bad and better examples

Google's snippet documentation gives paired examples. Summarised:

Problem	Bad	Better
List of keywords	"Sewing supplies, yarn, colored pencils, sewing machines, threads, bobbins, needles"	Says what the shop sells, its opening hours and its location.
Same text on every page	One generic line used for every news article.	A summary taken from the specific article.
Doesn't summarise the page	An opening anecdote about collecting eggs as a child.	States what the cooking guide covers: the methods and the time it takes.
Too short	"Mechanical pencil"	Specific features, options and an order detail.

The pattern is the same in each pair: the better version tells a searcher what they will find on that particular page.

Limiting or blocking snippets

Sometimes you want less, not more. Google supports three controls, set in a robots meta tag (or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header) or on page elements:

• nosnippet: "Do not show a text snippet or video preview in the search results for this page." Google notes this applies to all forms of its results, including Discover, AI Overviews and AI Mode, and keeps the content from being used as a direct input for them.
• max-snippet:[number]: "Use a maximum of [number] characters as a textual snippet." 0 is the same as nosnippet, and -1 lets Google choose the length. Without the rule, "Google will choose the length of the snippet."
• data-nosnippet: an attribute on span, div or section elements that keeps that text out of snippets, for example <span data-nosnippet>. The HTML must be valid and closed properly; an unclosed div "will include all content afterwards."

Some rules of the road from the specification: if rules conflict, "the more restrictive rule applies", so max-snippet:50 plus nosnippet means no snippet. Google can only follow these rules if its crawler is allowed to fetch the page, so don't block the page in robots.txt and expect the tag to work. And because rendering "is not guaranteed", Google asks you not to add or remove data-nosnippet on existing elements with JavaScript; our JavaScript SEO guide explains how Google renders pages.

Limiting snippets is rarely what a business site wants. These controls make sense for text you don't want quoted out of context, such as small print or user comments.

Checking your descriptions

1. Look at the results. Search for your main pages with a few different queries and compare the snippet with your description.
2. Find the pages that matter. In Search Console, the Pages tab of the Performance report shows impressions and click-through rate per URL; pages with many impressions and few clicks are worth a look.
3. Fix the cause, not the symptom. Replace duplicated, empty or keyword-list descriptions first. If Google keeps quoting a weak paragraph, the page text itself may need to be clearer.
4. Ask for a recrawl. Google only sees the change when it recrawls the page. For a few URLs use the URL Inspection tool.

Our view: how we write descriptions

This part is our own practice, not Google's guidance. On sites we build, each page gets its own description written by hand: one or two plain sentences that say what the page covers and who it's for, with the most useful part first, and usually kept under about 160 characters so it survives truncation on most screens. We don't repeat the title word for word. For templated pages we check that the template can't produce an empty or identical description. The og:description tag for social previews is a separate tag with its own job; we cover it in our guide to link previews and Open Graph tags.

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn't Google show my meta description?

Google builds snippets mainly from the page content and picks the text that best fits each search. It uses the meta description when it thinks it describes the page more accurately than text from the page, so the snippet can change from one query to the next.

How long should a meta description be?

Google sets no length limit. It truncates snippets as needed, typically to fit the device width, so put the most useful information near the start.

Does the meta description affect rankings?

Google's documentation presents the meta description as a possible source for the snippet; its value is in helping people decide whether to click. The separate meta keywords tag is not used by Google at all.

Can I stop Google from showing a snippet?

Yes. A robots meta tag with nosnippet, or max-snippet:0, stops the text snippet. To keep only part of a page out of snippets, wrap it in a span, div or section with the data-nosnippet attribute.

Should every page have its own meta description?

Google says identical or similar descriptions on every page aren't helpful. Write page-level descriptions, and if you can't do them all, start with the home page and your most popular pages.

For more on search, see our guides to title tags, structured data, Google Search Console and the website launch checklist. We build and maintain sites through our website development service.