Updated 2026-10-20

Missing meta descriptions at scale

A meta description is a one-sentence summary of a page in its <head>. Search engines may show it under your title, and link previews often use it. On a site with hundreds of pages, most end up with none, or the same one copied everywhere.

Does Google use them?

Sometimes. Google says it builds snippets mainly from page content, but may use the meta description when it describes the page better than the content alone (Google Search Central: snippets). It also asks for a unique description per page rather than one shared across the site. So a good description won't guarantee what Google shows, but a missing or duplicated one gives it nothing to work with.

Find the pages without one

On a static build, list every HTML file that has no description tag:

grep -rL --include='*.html' 'name="description"' dist

And find descriptions reused on more than one page:

grep -rhoE --include='*.html' '<meta name="description" content="[^"]*"' dist | sort | uniq -cd

For a live site, the free site checker lists pages without a description and descriptions shared by several pages, across up to 50 pages from your sitemap. A crawler such as Screaming Frog or your Search Console page reports give the full lists.

Fixing them by hand doesn't last

Writing 300 descriptions is a day of work. Keeping them true as prices, opening hours and product names change is the part that never happens.

Fixing them with Headlark

• Every page Headlark processes gets a description of 70 to 155 characters: a plain sentence about what the visitor gets, written in the page's language.
• It's written from what the page says. Numbers and emails in it must appear on the page.
• When a page's content changes, its description is rewritten on the next build or publish. Unchanged pages keep theirs, at no cost.
• It runs where your site is built (see the docs): one command after the build (Vite, Astro, Next.js), a Netlify plugin, or a Webflow webhook.

Review the descriptions on your most important pages. Google's guidance on AI-generated content asks for that, and it takes minutes when the rest is already done.

Try it

The free plan covers one site and 25 pages. Add your site, copy its secret key, and your next build ships with SEO.