How to write a meta description: a formula, templates and 20 examples by page type

How to write a meta description, in one line: tell the searcher what the page gives them, in their words, with one fact that proves it. That is the whole job. Google does not use the meta description to rank the page^[5]; it is the pitch under your title in the results, and its only measure of success is whether the right people click. This guide gives a four-part formula, fill-in templates, 20 examples across 9 page types, and real cases from 11 October 2026 where Google threw a site’s description away and showed something else.

Every example below is measured in pixels by the same code as our free SERP preview, so you can see whether it fits on desktop and how much a phone keeps. To draft from a real page instead, the meta description generator writes three options and runs the same checks.

What Google says a meta description is for

Google’s documentation describes the meta description as a short, relevant summary of what a page is about, which works like a pitch that convinces the user the page is exactly what they’re looking for^[1]. It also says how Google uses it. Snippets are created primarily from the page content itself, and the meta description is used when it might give a more accurate description of the page than text taken directly from it^[1].

So you are competing with your own page for the snippet. The bar for a good meta description is a better summary of this page, for this search, than any sentence on it.

Google’s guidance warns against three things:

• Long strings of keywords. Google says these are less likely to be displayed as a snippet.
• The same description on many pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren’t helpful when individual pages appear in search results.
• Text that doesn’t summarise the page. Google’s example is a childhood memory about picking eggs, on a page about how to cook them.

Summarised from Google’s documentation^[1].

The formula: four parts, in this order

Then check the length. Aim for 120 to 155 characters with the first two parts inside the first 100, because that is roughly where a phone cuts. Our post on meta description length shows where those numbers come from, including what Google cut on 11 October 2026.

<meta name="description" content="[Keyword phrase]: [what the reader gets]. [One concrete specific]. [Why this result]." />

Meta description templates by page type

The same four parts look different on different pages. These templates are a starting point. Fill every bracket with a fact from the page, or leave it out.

Home page
[What you are] for [who]: [the two or three main jobs]. [Proof or first step].

Product
[Product name], [key spec]. [What makes it different]. [Price, delivery or returns].

Category
[Range] for [use or buyer]: [what sets the range apart]. [Count, filter or offer].

Blog post (how-to)
How to [task]: [step 1], [step 2] and [step 3]. [What else the post adds].

Blog post (list or review)
The [number] best [things] for [use], tested for [criteria]. [Hint of the verdict].

Local business
[Service] in [place]: [main services]. [Hours, booking or area]. [Trust signal].

SaaS feature
[Feature]: [what it does, in the order the user does it]. [The detail that builds trust].

Pricing
[Product] pricing: [cheapest plan and price], [next plan and price]. [What is included or the terms].

20 meta description examples, by page type

These are our illustrations for invented businesses, not descriptions from real sites. Each line under an example is computed when this page is built, in Arial at 14 px against a 920 px desktop budget and a 680 px phone budget (seoClarity’s measurements^[3]). 13 of the 20 fit on desktop. Every one is cut somewhere on a phone, which is why each puts its point first.

Read them side by side and the pattern repeats. The keyword opens the line. The middle says what is on the page, in nouns and numbers rather than adjectives. The last clause is the part that can be cut without losing the point: an offer, a policy, a call to action. None of them says “welcome to”, “learn more” or “the best” without saying best at what.

Real examples: what Google kept, and what it threw away

On 11 October 2026 we pulled the top 10 US desktop results for six everyday searches through DataForSEO^[4] and compared each snippet with the page’s own meta description. Some descriptions were shown word for word. These two are good models:

Both lead with the searcher’s words (“plans and pricing”, “flat feet”) and say what the page offers. Neither is clever. Both fit, or nearly fit, the desktop width, and the Brooks line shows that our 920 px budget is slightly cautious: Google showed all of it.

Other descriptions were replaced. Here is what three sites wrote, and what Google showed instead:

The pattern is the same in all three. The description talked about the page; the search wanted the answer. Google went into the page and found the sentence that gave it. That is not a penalty and the pages still rank, but the snippet is no longer the pitch the site chose. Ahrefs, in a study of 20,000 keywords, found Google rewrote descriptions 62.78% of the time, and more often on long-tail searches (65.62%) than on popular ones (59.65%)^[2]. You can’t write one description for every phrasing, but you can stop writing ones that promise instead of answer.

Bad vs better: three common mistakes

What a generator writes for the same page

To show what an AI draft looks like, we ran our generator once on the Lodge care page above, with the keyword “how to clean cast iron”, on 11 October 2026. These are its three options, unedited:

The third is the one to start from: it carries the three steps, which is exactly what Google pulled from the page on its own. The first two are fine but softer (“top shape”, “simple steps”). That is the honest picture of AI drafts: useful, quick, and worth a human edit. Google’s documentation allows programmatic descriptions on large sites as long as they are human-readable and diverse^[1]; it does not excuse descriptions that say nothing.

After you write it

Before publishing, search the query yourself and read the snippets that rank: yours should be the obvious click among them. Then paste it into the SERP preview with the query, so the bold words are measured too.

Then publish it in your CMS. The field lives in a different place in WordPress, each SEO plugin, and Shopify; our guide to meta descriptions in WordPress and Shopify has the steps. Once it is live, check what Google actually shows: why Google ignores your meta description explains how, and what to do if it is replaced.

Questions people ask

Sources