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
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, 65% of the sites where it applies (82% of the sites we could read) passed the “Description fits a search snippet” check.
WordPress sites pass it most often, at 78%. Webflow sites pass it least often, at 63%.
On the sites scanned in both October 2026 and November 2026, it stayed at 63%.
The month-by-month line counts the sites scanned in each calendar month, so it can differ from the figure above, which uses each site’s latest scan from the last three months.
Goes with
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Sites that pass this are twice as likely to pass the “Images are optimised” check too. 13% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 6% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are twice as likely to pass the “security.txt is published” check too. 5% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 3% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 1.5 times as likely to pass the “Content usage preferences declared” check too. 4% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 3% of the sites that do not.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned. Most of these sites come from lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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