Missing meta description
No meta description means the search engine writes your snippet for you, out of context. A written one is the first line a searcher reads.
What it is
The meta description is a <meta name="description"> tag summarizing the page in a sentence or two. Search engines usually — not always — use it verbatim as the snippet shown under a result's title.
The useful range is roughly 50-160 characters: long enough to be a real summary, short enough that search engines don't cut it off mid-sentence.
Why it matters
Without one, a search engine writes its own snippet by pulling text from the page, which is often an out-of-context sentence rather than a description anyone chose. A written description is a chance to say, in the searcher's own words, why this result answers their query.
It doesn't affect ranking directly, but it affects the click-through rate on results that do rank — the description is the first sentence a searcher reads before deciding to click.
How to fix it
with a reference doc<meta name="description" content="A concise, accurate summary of this page.">Related checks
3This is one of the 75 checks the scanner runs. See what we check for the full list, every severity weight, and how the score is computed from them.