The page has no meta description
What this check looks for
There is no meta description on this page. Search engines will write the snippet under your result themselves, using text they pick from the page.
Why it matters
The snippet is the sentence people read before deciding whether to click. A generated one is often a fragment lifted mid-sentence from the body, which reads worse than something written for the purpose.
When the check passes, your report says: “The page writes its own search-result description”.
What it costs your score
When this check fails it removes 6 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
- confirmed
- Status when triggered
- warn
- Deduction
- 6 points
- Family cap
- seo.meta · 20
- Category
- SEO
- Module
- Seo audit
- Fix owned by
- user
- In the ruleset since
- 2026.09
How to fix it
Write a meta description for this page.
It is the sentence under your result, and a written one reads better than a fragment an algorithm lifts from the body.
Add
<meta name="description" content="…">to the<head>.Describe what the page offers in one or two sentences, in the words a searcher would use.
Make it specific to the page. A description repeated site-wide is worse than none.
Do not stuff keywords — the description is not a ranking input and a list of terms reads badly to the person deciding whether to click.
How to confirm it worked
curl -sS ‹url› | grep -i 'name="description"' — should show a written description
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.
Remediation by platform
<meta name="description" content="A step-by-step guide to keeping a sourdough starter alive, including what to do when it stops rising.">One or two sentences. Write it for the person reading the results page, not for a crawler.
Technical detail
No <meta name="description"> was found in the served HTML.
A meta description is not a ranking factor and Google has said so repeatedly. What it is, is a *candidate* snippet: Google uses it when it judges it a good match for the query and generates its own otherwise. In practice a well-written description is used for navigational and branded queries and displaced for long-tail ones.
That makes this a low-severity finding, and it is scored as one. Write a description for the pages that matter — the home page, the main landing pages, anything people arrive at from a branded search — and do not spend time writing one for every page of a large site.
Avoid generating identical descriptions across pages. Google's own guidance is that a duplicated description is worse than none, because it gives the searcher nothing to choose between.
Standards and references
Test this on your domain
Run the check that produces this finding, on its own, against any domain.
Other seo audit checks
- The page declares more than one canonical URL
- The canonical URL cannot be used
- The page declares no canonical URL
- The canonical URL points at a different page
- The page has no h1 heading
- The heading levels skip a level
- The page has more than one h1
- An hreflang annotation is not valid
- The hreflang set does not include this page
- The page's declared language is not a well-formed language tag
- The page does not declare what language it is written in
- Images on the page have no alt attribute