What is a page's meta description?

The meta description is not the product description, the text your customer reads on the product page, and it is not the meta title, which is the blue link in the result. It is the summary you write for the results page, a line nobody sees in your store that may appear under that link when someone searches for what you sell. For a store it matters for a practical reason: it is the only text in the result that you write with the aim of convincing someone who has not come in yet, and if you don't write it, the search engine pulls it from wherever it can.

How it works

In code, the meta description is a meta element with the name description inside the page's head. The HTML standard defines it as free text that describes the page, suitable for a directory of pages such as a search engine, and does not allow more than one per document.⁠^{[1]WHATWG. HTML Standard, 4.2.5.1 Standard metadata names} What the standard does not say is what each search engine does with it, and that is where the important part is.

Google builds the result's snippet mostly from the page's own content, automatically. Sometimes it uses the meta description, when it can give searchers a more accurate description than a piece of the content.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Control your snippets in search results} The snippet also tries to highlight the part of the page that best answers the specific search, so the same page can show different snippets depending on what was searched.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Control your snippets in search results} Writing a meta description does not guarantee it will show; it raises the chances that the result says what you want for the searches that matter most to you.

Length is the most repeated doubt. Google says it plainly: there is no length limit for a meta description, but the snippet is truncated in the results when needed, usually to fit the width of the device.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Control your snippets in search results} Shopify, in its help center, recommends using 160 characters for the search engine listing description.⁠^{[3]Shopify Help Center. Adding keywords for SEO to your Shopify store} It is a useful figure to keep the main idea from being cut off on the screen, not a requirement: what goes at the beginning is what is most likely to be read in full.

Google's recommendations for a good meta description fit into four rules:⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Control your snippets in search results}

• One per page. Identical or similar descriptions across all pages do not help when each one appears on its own in the results. If you can't write them all, start with the most important and most visited pages.
• Concrete facts. The description can pull together information that is scattered across the page: in its book example, the author, the illustrator, the price and the page count.
• Generated, if they read well. On large sites built on a database, generating descriptions automatically from each page's data is acceptable, as long as the result is readable and varied.
• No keyword lists. A description made only of keywords does not describe the page and has little chance of showing as a snippet.

Google also gives three controls for the opposite, limiting what is shown: nosnippet prevents the snippet, max-snippet sets its maximum length and data-nosnippet excludes a specific part of the page.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Control your snippets in search results} They are the same controls Google points to for limiting what is shown from your pages in its AI features.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} And it is worth knowing that to show up as a link in those features, a page has to be indexed and be eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet.⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search} A nosnippet set to control the meta description has consequences beyond the classic result.

In a store

Three possible meta descriptions for the same backpack product page. This is a fictional example: the store and the product are made up to compare the three approaches against Google's recommendations.

The third is the one Google asks for: unique, with concrete facts and readable. And it is the one that can be generated at scale, because each fact comes from the product's fields (capacity, material, compartment), not from the writer's inspiration. In the page's code it looks like this:

<head>
  <title>Waterproof 20 L Urban Backpack</title>
  <meta
    name="description"
    content="20-liter waterproof urban backpack with a padded laptop sleeve. 24-hour shipping."
  />
</head>

On category pages the same applies: a description that says what that category gathers, not the whole store's. Clione writes the meta description for each product page and carries the product's keywords into it, alongside the JSON-LD.

How to check it

1. Open the source code of a published product page and look for name="description". There should be only one, and its text should be what you saved in the admin.⁠^{[1]WHATWG. HTML Standard, 4.2.5.1 Standard metadata names}
2. Compare three product pages in the same category. If the three descriptions say the same thing, they are generic, even if well written.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Control your snippets in search results}
3. Search for the product page on Google with a product query and see which snippet appears. Repeat with another query: the snippet can change from one search to another.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Control your snippets in search results}
4. Check that no important page carries nosnippet or a very short max-snippet unless someone decided it, because it also limits what can be shown in Google's AI features.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. AI features and your website}
5. In Search Console, look at the CTR of your product pages with many impressions. A low CTR at a good position is the sign that the result, title and snippet, is not convincing.

Related concept: product description

The product description is the visible text on the product page: it is read by the customer who has already come in and can run to several paragraphs. The meta description sits in the head, is not visible on the page and is read by someone still on the results. One is written to decide the purchase; the other, to decide the click. They can share facts, and it is good that they do, because Google prefers the snippet that best describes the page; what you don't want is to copy the first paragraph of one into the other without thinking about who is searching.

To keep going, the catalog and entities reading path puts the rest of the product page terms in order, and the entry on publication verification explains how to check that the description you save is the one that reaches the page.