# Meta description

> The page summary shown under the title in results — no direct ranking weight, but it writes your ad copy.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking input — Google has said so plainly and often. What they control is the two lines of grey text under the title, which is the pitch for the click. A page that ranks but gets skipped wins nothing, so the description's job is the same as ad copy: name the thing, name who it is for, give a reason to choose this result over the identical-looking ones beside it. Around 150–160 characters survive on desktop, fewer on mobile.

Google rewrites descriptions most of the time — it pulls the snippet it thinks answers the query better — which is not a reason to skip writing them: the supplied description is used when it matches the query, and the discipline of writing one good sentence about a page is a good test of whether the page has a job at all.

## Related terms

- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/title-tag.md
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/serp.md
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/seo.md
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/open-graph.md

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Source: https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/meta-description
DField Solutions — Dunakeszi, Hungary — dezso@dfieldsolutions.com
Booking: see https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/contact