Missing meta description

What the description is used for

The meta description is a summary of the page that you write for other software to show. Search engines use it as the snippet under the title when it matches what the searcher asked for. Google rewrites snippets often, drawing on page text that fits the query better, but it still uses a good description for many searches, especially brand and navigational ones.

When the tag is absent, the snippet is assembled from body text. Crawlers do not know which paragraph is the important one, so you get a sentence fragment from the hero, a run of menu labels, or the first line of a consent banner. Social networks and chat apps also fall back to the meta description when there is no og:description, so the same gap shows up in link previews.

Who reads it

Searchers deciding between results read the snippet to judge whether a page answers their question. A description that says what the page offers and who it is for gives them a reason to choose it. A scraped fragment does not.

Pages with little body text suffer most: contact pages, pricing tables, booking forms, and image-led portfolio pages. On a client site, the business owner typing their own name into a search box and seeing "We use cookies to improve your experience" under their logo is a conversation you would rather not have.

How Skewcheck checks it

Skewcheck looks for meta name="description" with content in the page head. If there is none, the check fails with medium severity and deducts 5 points from the audit score. If the description is longer than 170 characters, the check warns with low severity and deducts 2 points instead. Anything present and 170 characters or shorter passes.

The 170-character limit leaves some headroom. Search snippets on desktop are usually cut somewhere around 150 to 160 characters, and shorter on phones, so text past that point is unlikely to be seen. Writing between 120 and 160 characters keeps the whole thought visible in most places it appears.

Writing and adding the tag

Write each description for its own page. Say what is here, for whom, and what the reader can do next. Use the words people would search for, in a normal sentence, not a comma-separated keyword list. If the description needs a double quote, use " or rephrase, because a raw double quote ends the content attribute early and silently truncates the tag.

In the Next.js App Router, set description in the metadata export for static pages, or return it from generateMetadata when the text comes from a CMS or database. Fall back to a trimmed excerpt rather than nothing when an editor leaves the field empty.

import type { Metadata } from "next";

export const metadata: Metadata = {
  title: "Pricing",
  description:
    "Three fixed-price website packages for small businesses, from a one-page site to a full online shop. See what each plan includes.",
};

Common mistakes

The most common mistake is one description repeated across the whole site, set once in a layout and never overridden. Every page passes this check, but search engines treat identical snippets as noise and rewrite them. Skewcheck audits one URL at a time, so run it on several page types to spot the pattern.

An empty content attribute gives search engines nothing to use, so treat it as missing. Descriptions do not move a page up or down in search results; their job is to make the result readable once it appears. Do not copy the title into the description; use the extra space to add detail the title had no room for.

Before and after

<head>
  <title>Pricing | Example Studio</title>
</head>

<head>
  <title>Pricing | Example Studio</title>
  <meta name="description" content="Three fixed-price website packages for small businesses, from a one-page site to a full online shop. See what each plan includes.">
</head>