The fix, in one snippet
<meta name="description" content="Compare running shoes built for flat feet, with fit notes, arch ratings and three tested models.">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
We read <meta name="description"> from each page and report those with no tag or an empty value. The comparison is on the served HTML, so descriptions added by client-side scripts are not counted: a crawler taking its first pass at the page will not see them either.
Open Graph descriptions are read separately and do not satisfy this check, because most search engines ignore og:description when composing a snippet.
Why it matters
A meta description is not a ranking factor and has not been one for many years. It is a conversion factor: it is the two lines a searcher reads before deciding whether to click, and writing them yourself is the only way to control that pitch.
Without one, Google extracts a passage from the page. Sometimes that works well. Often it pulls navigation text, a cookie banner, a price table or the first paragraph regardless of relevance, and the result reads as though nobody is home.
The description is also what most social platforms and chat apps fall back to when Open Graph tags are missing, so an empty one degrades every shared link as well.
How to fix it
Write one per page, from the page's own content, addressed to someone who has not arrived yet:
<meta name="description" content="Compare running shoes built for flat feet, with fit notes, arch support ratings and the three models our testers returned to.">Say what the page contains and what the reader gets. Avoid generic marketing copy, avoid repeating the title, and never duplicate the same sentence site-wide. For large catalogues, generate from structured fields rather than leaving the tag empty, but vary the sentence so the result is not identical across thousands of pages.
Where this fits
Meta description missing is check 5 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 H1 missing (medium), where the H1 is the page's visible headline. 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 missing closes one route in. Immediately below it: Thin content, where pages with very little body text rarely satisfy the query that brought someone to them, and rarely rank for anything competitive; Title length outside the useful range, where titles are truncated in search results at roughly 600 pixels; Duplicate meta descriptions, where the same description on many pages tells a searcher nothing about which one to open.
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 missing (medium severity)
Scanner check id: seo-description-missingThe 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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