The fix, in one snippet
<meta name="description" content="Free passive scan of any site: headers, TLS, cookies and exposed files, graded A to F with a fix for each.">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
Each meta description's character length is measured and reported against a 70 to 160 character window. As with titles, the real limit is pixel width and varies by device, so the window is a guide rather than a rule; the evidence lists each page with its actual length so you can judge the borderline cases.
Google has never published a character limit, and the width it truncates at has changed several times. The window used here matches what fits on a desktop result at the time of writing, with enough margin that a description at the top of the range is not cut by a small change.
Why it matters
The snippet is the only sales copy you control in a results page. A twenty-character description leaves most of the available space blank next to competitors using all of it. A three-hundred-character one is truncated at a point you did not choose, often mid-clause, which reads as careless.
Mobile results show less than desktop, so the first 120 characters carry most of the weight regardless of the limit you write to.
How to fix it
Write to about 150 characters and put the important half first, so that truncation on a narrow screen still leaves a complete thought:
<!-- 149 characters -->
<meta name="description" content="Free passive scan of any website: headers, TLS, cookies and exposed files, graded A to F with a paste-ready fix for every finding.">Check the rendered length rather than the source, since templates often prepend or append a brand phrase. If a CMS field has no counter, add one; authors cannot write to a limit they cannot see.
Where this fits
Meta description length is check 10 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 Heading levels skipped (low), where heading levels should descend one at a time. 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
Meta description length closes one route in. Immediately below it: More than one H1, where several H1s on one page split its subject; Reading difficulty, where how hard the page is to read, measured rather than guessed: Sentence length, word length and the Flesch score they produce; Title does not match the page's own words, where if none of a page's most frequent words appear in its title, the title and the content are describing different things.
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: Meta description length (low severity)
Scanner check id: seo-description-lengthThe 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.
Sign in with GoogleSigning in is free and takes one click. We store your email address and nothing else.