Is my meta description too long or too short?
Your meta description has a sweet spot. Too long and a search result cuts it off mid-thought; too short and it says too little to help. We measure it, show you where it lands, and leave it out of your score, because a description of any length can still be read by a machine.
What it actually is
The description is the couple of lines under your title in a set of results. Google sets no limit on how long it may be, but it trims what it shows to fit the width of the screen. So we measure how wide your description would render rather than counting letters, and Chinese, Japanese or Korean descriptions are judged on their real width.
Why it matters
A description is often the second thing a person reads about your page. When the end is cut off, the part that is lost is usually the reason to choose the page. A very short one has the opposite problem: it shows in full and still does not say enough to stand out. Engines also frequently replace what you wrote with their own extract, which is why length is a courtesy to people rather than a lever.
What good looks like
A description that fits the space a result gives it and still says what the page offers: the point first, a reason to choose it after, nothing padded and nothing trailing off into an ellipsis.
Being honest about it
This is a presentation detail, and it does not move your score. Whether a description exists matters to a machine, and that is a separate check that does count. Length only decides how much of it a person sees in a results list. Our bounds are also a judgement of our own: Google publishes no limit, and a short description is never truncated.
Where most sites go wrong
Long descriptions usually come from a template that pastes the first paragraph of the page in whole. Short ones are a few words left from the CMS, such as the page name repeated, or a placeholder that was never replaced.
On the web
In October 2026, 70% of the sites we scanned passed the “Description fits a search snippet” check.
| Result | Share of sites |
|---|---|
| Pass | 70% |
| Worth a look | 30% |
| To fix | 0% |
| Couldn't judge | 0% |
WordPress sites pass it most often, at 78%. Next.js sites pass it least often, at 64%.
Goes with
- Sites that pass this are 4 times as likely to pass the “Auth.md agent registration” check too.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned: ones people chose to scan, plus lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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