Meta description length across 27 homepages, and why 160 is not a rule

FIELD TEST · 2026-08-17 · 30 sites · single snapshot

Sample and method: the same 30 sites from our robots.txt and sitemap surveys. One homepage request each, browser user agent, 2026-08-17. Three refused us, so counts are out of 27. Same crawl as four other posts in this batch.

There is no meta description length limit. Google's own documentation says so in one sentence, and then says something more awkward: it builds the snippet from page content and only uses your description when that describes the page better. Across 27 homepages the median description runs 130 characters, four exceed 160, five come in under 70, and four sites ship none at all.

What 27 homepages actually wrote

The spread runs from 30 characters to 267. Both ends belong to sites that clearly thought about it.

Median across the 23 that have one: 130 characters. That is comfortably inside the number most guidance quotes, which suggests the guidance has been absorbed even where it is not a real rule.

How we measured it

Fixed before the crawl, unchanged after.

1. Request the homepage once with a desktop browser user agent, following redirects.
2. Read <meta name="description"> from the delivered HTML and count characters in its content attribute.
3. Record zero when the tag is absent, and do not distinguish that from an empty one.

Characters, not pixels. Truncation in practice depends on rendered width, and we did not render anything.

The 160-character rule is not Google's rule

Google Search Central states it plainly: "There's no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width." Truncation is a display behaviour tied to the reader's screen, not a validation threshold.

The more consequential sentence on that same page is this one: "Google primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet. We may also use descriptive information in the meta description element when it describes the page better than other parts of the content."

So the description is a candidate, not an instruction. Writing one is worth doing; treating its exact character count as a lever is optimising a field that may not be shown.

Four sites ship no description, for different reasons

Discord, Canva, Webflow and Hacker News send nothing. Canva belongs in a separate bucket — its homepage delivers 3 KB of loader with no description, no h1, no canonical and no structured data, because none of it exists before JavaScript runs.

The other three deliver full HTML and simply omit the tag. For those, Google will assemble a snippet from body text, which it would often do anyway. The cost is not that nothing gets shown; it is that you have no candidate in the running.

Why this matters differently for AI answers

A search snippet gets truncated and a reader still clicks through. An answer engine does not show your description at all — it reads the page and paraphrases. So the description's job in that context is narrower than in search: it is one more statement of what the page is, sitting next to the title and the h1.

That is reasoning from how these systems are documented to work, not a measurement. We did not test whether any engine weighs the description, and we will not put a number on something we did not observe.

What this crawl cannot tell you

We do not know how many of these descriptions Google actually displays. Confirming that means checking live results for each site, which is a different study with a moving target — snippets vary by search term, by device, and over time.

We also measured characters, and truncation is measured in pixels. A 130-character description in a wide font may cut earlier than a 150-character one in a narrow font, and nothing here accounts for that.

What to do about your own meta description length

Two habits worth keeping and two worth dropping. The dropped ones are where most of the effort currently goes.

• Write one for every page that matters, and make it a statement about that page rather than about the company.
• Front-load the specific part. If it does get cut, the half that survives should still be the useful half.
• Do not chase an exact character count. The number in the guidance is not in Google's documentation.
• Do not leave it to a template that emits the same sentence sitewide. Identical descriptions on every page are worse than none.

What an engine may quote from your page is governed by a different mechanism entirely, covered in nosnippet is the real AI lever. For how to make the page body itself worth quoting, see what makes content citable by AI. Auditing descriptions across every page, including the duplicate-template problem, is what QueryWin is being built to catch.

Common questions

Is there a meta description length limit?

No. Google's documentation says there is no limit and that snippets are truncated to fit the device. The widely quoted 155 or 160 figure is a rule of thumb about display width, not a specification.

Should I write one if Google usually ignores it?

Yes, because "usually" is not "always" and the cost is one line. Google says it uses the description when it describes the page better than the body text does.

Is 267 characters a mistake?

The New York Times runs the longest one here. Nothing breaks; the tail simply may not appear. Whether that matters depends on whether the first 130 characters already carry the point.

Does a missing description hurt AI citations?

Not something we tested. An answer engine reads the page body, so a missing description removes a summary signal rather than the content itself.