What is the meta description?

The meta description is an HTML meta element that summarizes the content of a page in a few sentences. Together with the meta title it forms the main part of the snippet on the SERP, where it sits directly below the title. It is not a direct ranking factor, but it decides whether searchers click on your result, which makes it a lever for your click-through rate.

Meta description explained: the description text below the title in the Google search result

Metadata is enriched extra information about the individual pages of a website. The meta description therefore does not have to be visible to users on the page itself.

If you add it by hand in the HTML code, the description belongs in the <head> section of the page, written with the <meta> tag:

<head>
    <meta name="description" content="⭐ SEO and GEO agency from Munich ► we get you found in Google and in AI answers 📈 Start now!">
</head>

If no description is stored as a meta tag in the code, search engines show an automatic excerpt from the page content instead. That excerpt can be cut off and may not reflect the content of the page well, which is why it is worth writing your own meta descriptions.

What is the optimal length for a meta description?

On average a length between 150 and 160 characters works well. Descriptions that run longer are shortened automatically and can no longer be read in full.

The character count alone does not settle it, though. Many checking tools look at the number of characters, but whether a description is displayed in full depends on the pixel width. That width is roughly 1,300 pixels in the mobile view and roughly 990 pixels on the desktop.

Results on the SERP are rendered in Arial by default, and not every character has the same width in that typeface. So always check whether your descriptions appear in full in the search and are not truncated.

Tip: the command site:domainname.tld (for example site:taismo.de) lists the indexed pages of a domain.