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The meta description is likely to be truncated or is very short

LowHigh confidenceQuick winseo.meta-description.length-outside-guidance

What this check looks for

The description is ‹length› characters. ‹detail› As with the title, this is about how much is displayed, not about ranking.

Why it matters

A description cut off mid-sentence reads as carelessness in the one place a searcher is judging whether your page is worth their click.

When the check passes, your report says: “The description length sits inside the usual display guidance”.

What it costs your score

When this check fails it removes 3 points from your SEO score, before the status, confidence and repeat multipliers are applied. SEO carries a weight of 5 in the overall score.

It shares the seo.meta family ceiling of 20 points: however many findings that family produces, together they cannot remove more than that from SEO. One underlying problem showing up in several places is still one problem.

Severity
low
Default confidence
high
Status when triggered
warn
Deduction
3 points
Family cap
seo.meta · 20
Category
SEO
Module
Seo audit
Fix owned by
user
In the ruleset since
2026.09

How the whole score is calculated

How to fix it

Make the first sentence of the description stand on its own.

Whatever the truncation point turns out to be, a self-contained first sentence still reads correctly.

  1. Lead with the page's offer or answer in one complete sentence.

  2. Use any following sentence for detail that is a bonus if shown.

  3. Aim for roughly 50 to 160 characters, treating both ends as guidance rather than as limits.

How to confirm it worked

  • curl -sS ‹url› | grep -i 'name="description"' — confirm the rewritten text

A named slot like ‹domain› — and the braces left in the configuration below — is filled in with your own values when this rule appears on a report.

Technical detail

The description is:

> ‹description›

**A heuristic, labelled as one.** Snippets are truncated at around 160 characters on desktop and less on mobile, and the exact point varies with the query, the device and whether Google has decided to show a longer snippet. There is no published limit and no penalty for exceeding it.

The practical advice is the same as for titles: put the point in the first sentence. A description whose first sentence stands on its own survives any truncation.

A description under about 50 characters is usually a fragment rather than a description, and Google is more likely to replace it with generated text — which is not a failure, but it does mean the effort spent writing it achieved nothing.

Standards and references

Test this on your domain

Run the check that produces this finding, on its own, against any domain.

Open the seo audit checker

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