The fix, in one snippet
<meta name="description" content="{{ page.summary or page.body|striptags|truncate(150) }}">Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
Descriptions are compared across crawled pages, case-insensitively and with surrounding whitespace removed, and any value used on more than one URL is reported together with the pages sharing it.
Since the crawl is a sample of the site, a duplicate found here usually points at a template rather than at two pages: one hard-coded string, or a fallback that fires whenever the per-page field is empty.
Why it matters
Duplicate descriptions usually mean one hard-coded sentence in a base template. The effect is that every result from your site in a listing reads identically, so the searcher has no basis for choosing between them and often chooses neither.
Google frequently ignores a description it considers unhelpful and generates its own, so a duplicated sentence often does not even appear. The effort of writing it is wasted along with the space.
It also hides a deeper problem: pages that cannot be described differently may not be different enough to deserve separate URLs.
How to fix it
Generate the description from fields that vary per page, and fall back to the page's own opening sentence rather than to a site-wide string:
<meta name="description" content="{{ page.summary or page.body|striptags|truncate(150) }}">For listing and filter pages, include the filter in the sentence. For pages that genuinely cannot be distinguished, consider whether they should be one page with a canonical, rather than several with the same pitch.
If a template has to fall back, fall back to something derived from the page rather than to a constant. An excerpt of the page's own first paragraph is a weak description but a distinct one, and it degrades far better than the same marketing sentence repeated across a catalogue.
Where this fits
Duplicate meta descriptions is check 8 of 13 that the seo & site health audit runs under titles, headings and content, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Title length outside the useful range (medium), where titles are truncated in search results at roughly 600 pixels. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Duplicate meta descriptions closes one route in. Immediately below it: Heading levels skipped, where heading levels should descend one at a time; Meta description length, where descriptions much shorter than 70 characters waste the space; much longer than 160 are cut off mid-sentence; More than one H1, where several H1s on one page split its subject.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Duplicate meta descriptions (low severity)
Scanner check id: seo-description-duplicateThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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