Description text, and why snippets ignore it

13 August 2026 · Writing

The description you write is a suggestion. The line shown under a result is assembled per query, frequently from a passage inside the page rather than from your meta element, because a passage containing the words someone typed is more useful to them than a summary written before you knew the question.

Then why write one

Because it is used when nothing better presents itself, which is common for broad queries and for pages whose text is thin on the exact phrasing. Because it is often what appears when the address is shared or previewed elsewhere. And because writing one forces you to state what the page delivers in a sentence, which regularly exposes a page that cannot state it.

What a good one does

It describes the contents and their scope rather than advertising them. It uses the vocabulary of the page, since matching words are highlighted and highlighting draws the eye. It gives a reason to choose this page over the one above it: a distinction, a limitation, a specific angle. And it stops before the point where it will be cut, around one and a half lines of ordinary prose.

Common failures

• The same description on two hundred pages, generated from a template with only the category name changed.
• A description that is the first sentence of the page, duplicated. It costs nothing, but it also adds nothing the snippet machinery could not have found alone.
• Marketing language with no content: a page promising to transform your approach tells nobody what is inside it.
• A description that promises something the page does not contain, which produces clicks followed by immediate departures, and teaches readers to skip your listings.

Structured data, briefly

Machine-readable annotations can affect how a listing is drawn: a date, a breadcrumb path, a set of steps. They describe what is already on the page and they never substitute for it. Annotation that claims something the visible page does not support is the fastest way to lose the enhanced treatment entirely.

Judging the result

You cannot see every snippet, but you can see the effect. Compare pages with similar average positions and different click rates. Where a page is shown often and chosen rarely, the listing is the problem, and the listing is made of the title, the address and the description text. That is a writing task, and it is usually a twenty-minute one.

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