Meta Description Checker: Catch Missing, Truncated and Duplicate Tags

A meta description checker goes through the URLs on a site and reports whether each meta description is missing, too long, too short or duplicated on other pages. The meta description is not a Google ranking factor, but it shapes the snippet people read before deciding to click, so defects in it cost click-through rate even on pages that rank well.

Google also rewrites snippets when it considers the written description a poor match for the query, frequently pulling a sentence from the page body instead. A description that accurately summarises the page gives Google less reason to replace it.

Why descriptions degrade after launch

Most teams write meta descriptions at launch or during a content refresh and then stop looking. After that, the descriptions change for reasons that have nothing to do with SEO. A CMS update changes a template. A migration fails to carry over a custom field. An editor duplicates a page to create a new one and never touches the description. None of it appears in a rank tracker, and it tends to surface months later as a CTR decline in the Search Console Performance report that nobody can explain.

The four defects, and what causes each

A missing description means no <meta name="description" content="..."> in the <head>. WordPress core does not output one at all, so on WordPress the tag comes from an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math; deactivate the plugin during a troubleshooting session and every description disappears at once. Google then builds the snippet from page text, which is rarely the sentence you would have chosen.

A description that is too long gets truncated in the results with an ellipsis. The limit is really a pixel width rather than a character count, but roughly 155 to 160 characters is a safe working figure on desktop. The usual culprit is a template that appends a fixed suffix to every description, like the site name, category and a "free delivery" line.

A description that is too short wastes the space. On auto-generated product pages the field often just repeats the product name. On Shopify, when the "Search engine listing" description is left empty, the storefront typically falls back to the start of the product description, which can be a line of specifications or shipping text.

A duplicated description is the same text across many URLs, usually a template default nobody customised. Yoast's snippet variables are a common source when a template like %%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%% is used for descriptions across a whole post type.

Checking descriptions yourself

For a single page, open view-source: followed by the URL and search for name="description". A browser SEO extension will show the same tag in a panel.

For a whole site, a crawler is faster. Screaming Frog's free version crawls up to 500 URLs and has a Meta Description tab with filters for missing, duplicate, over and below a character or pixel threshold, and multiple descriptions on one page. Export the duplicates and you have a working list.

Pair that with Search Console. In Performance, filter to pages with plenty of impressions and low CTR; those are the descriptions worth rewriting first, whatever the crawler says about length.

The part a crawl does not cover

A crawl gives you the state of the site on the day you ran it. The problems above are drift, and drift happens between crawls: a plugin reset in March, a new product category launched in May without descriptions, a handover to another agency that does not know the old conventions. On a portfolio of client sites with a few hundred URLs each, nobody reruns a crawl after every deploy. That is the gap covered in our guide to SEO change alerts, and it is the same workflow described in how to monitor client websites for changes, applied to snippets.

How Deltio handles meta descriptions

Deltio checks the meta description on the pages in each site's sitemap once a day, together with the title tag, H1, canonical and noindex. It flags descriptions that are missing, too short, too long or duplicated across URLs, and because each check is compared with the previous one, a description that changed or disappeared after a deploy triggers an alert by Slack and email for that site. You can also run a manual SEO scan when you know a release has gone out.

Deltio will not tell you whether a description is persuasive, and it does not show how Google actually rewrote your snippet. For that, search the query yourself and look at the Performance report. On Professional and Enterprise plans you can export the results to CSV and hand the rewrite list to a copywriter.