Meta description length: the 120 to 160 character range

What the meta description is

The meta description is a summary a page offers for use in a search result snippet. Google documents that it may use the description for the snippet, and may instead draw text from the page when that better matches what the reader searched for.

That still makes it worth writing. When the page has no description, the snippet is assembled from whatever text sits near the query terms, which on a page with a long navigation or a cookie banner can be nothing useful. Length matters for the same reason as the title: a snippet is truncated at display width, and text past that is written for nobody.

What squirrel checks

The rule runs on every crawled page against the parsed description. It emits one check named meta-description:

• Failing with the message Missing meta description and a null value when there is none.
• Warning with the message Description too short under the minimum, or Description too long over the maximum. Both carry the description as the value, <min>-<max> characters as the expectation, and an item holding the page URL with the first 50 characters and the length. The defaults are 120 and 160 and both are configurable below.
• Passing with the message Description length OK and the description as the value.

Length is counted in characters of the parsed description. Severity is error and weight is 7.

Pages kept out of the search index are skipped. A page whose <meta name="robots"> tag or X-Robots-Tag header contains noindex (a header scoped to one crawler, such as googlebot: noindex, counts too) gets one skipped check named core/meta-description with the message Skipped: page is set to noindex via robots meta tag (or via X-Robots-Tag header) instead, because its description never appears in a search result. Skipped checks do not count toward the score. Pages are skipped only on a site that is itself being indexed, judged by its homepage, or by the page the audit started from when the homepage was not fetched. When that page is noindex, as on a staging site or a preview deployment (Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare Pages previews send X-Robots-Tag: noindex by default), nothing is skipped: the whole host is out of search and the audit is most likely checking it before launch. When neither page was fetched, nothing is skipped either. See pages kept out of search for the full list of rules that do this.

How to fix it

<meta
  name="description"
  content="How the build cache stores compiled output between runs, when it invalidates, and the three settings that control it."
/>

Write one per page, summarising that page. A description repeated across a section is worse than none, because it tells a reader nothing that distinguishes the pages.

The common false positive is a page whose description is deliberately absent so that Google composes a snippet from the content, which is a defensible choice on a long reference page. The rule reports it as missing either way.

Options

Configuration example

[rules."core/meta-description"]
min_length = 120
max_length = 160

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["core/meta-description"]

Disable all Core SEO rules

[rules]
disable = ["core/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["core/meta-description"]

enable replaces the default ["*"], so this is the only rule selected. Leave disable out: a rule that matches any disable pattern is skipped even when enable names it. Only an enabled setting under a rule’s own [rule_options] table overrides both lists.

Related rules

• content/duplicate-description: the same description used on more than one page.
• core/meta-title: the title above the snippet.
• core/nosnippet: the directive that suppresses the snippet entirely.
• core/og-tags: the description used when the page is shared instead of searched.

Core SEO findings ship in every audit next to the performance, security and agent experience rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• Control your snippets in search results, Google Search Central
• meta name=description, MDN

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the Core SEO section of the report. Each page reports its description and character count. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.