{"id":34509,"date":"2020-03-24T20:26:45","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T01:26:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/?p=34509"},"modified":"2023-05-15T03:56:26","modified_gmt":"2023-05-15T08:56:26","slug":"meta-description-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/meta-description-study\/","title":{"rendered":"How Often Does Google Rewrite Meta Descriptions? (New Data Study)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Meta descriptions aren\u2019t a ranking factor, but they can entice more clicks\u2014and that leads to more traffic.<\/div>\n

That said, you\u2019ve probably noticed that Google doesn\u2019t always use the hardcoded meta description. It sometimes chooses a different snippet from the page.<\/p>\n

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If you\u2019ve spent time crafting an enticing meta description<\/a>, this can be annoying.<\/p>\n

But how often does it happen?<\/p>\n

To find out, we compared hardcoded meta descriptions with the actual Google desktop snippets for 20,000 keywords.<\/p>\n

But first, an interesting fact\u2026<\/p>\n

\"Beginner's
New to on-page SEO? Check out our<\/div>
Beginner\u2019s guide to on-page SEO<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n

25.02% of top-ranking pages don\u2019t have a meta description<\/h2>\n

Crazy, right?!<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s the breakdown by ranking position:<\/p>\n

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For anyone wondering, the Spearman correlation here is 0.28, which is considered weak.<\/p>\n

Still, for those with descriptions, how often do they show up?<\/p>\n

Google rewrites meta descriptions 62.78% of the time<\/h2>\n

Yes\u2013Google rewrites meta descriptions for the majority<\/strong> of search results.<\/p>\n

\"p<\/a><\/p>\n

This already tells us quite a lot, but it\u2019s always more insightful to segment the data\u2026<\/p>\n

That number drops to 59.65% for fat-head and rises to 65.62% for long-tails<\/h2>\n

We hypothesized that Google would generate descriptions more often for long-tail keywords.<\/p>\n

This was based on the fact that the average first-page result ranks for hundreds of keywords<\/a>, and the hardcoded descriptions are usually written around the primary \u201chead\u201d keyword.<\/p>\n

For example, our primary target keyword for this post<\/a> is \u201cyoutube keyword tools\u201d\u2014so we wrote the meta description with that in mind.<\/p>\n

As a result, Google shows our hardcoded description in the results for the target keyword\u2026<\/p>\n

\"4<\/p>\n

\u2026 but not for some of the long-tail keywords the post ranks for:<\/p>\n

\"3<\/p>\n

This happens because the hardcoded description is less relevant for the long-tails. It makes more sense for Google to choose its own snippet.<\/p>\n

But, what we found surprised us:<\/p>\n

While Google is more likely to rewrite meta descriptions for long-tail keywords, it\u2019s only by a small margin.<\/p>\n

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My guess is that the gap will grow over time as Google gets better at understanding search intent<\/a> and subsequently providing the most relevant search snippets.<\/p>\n

Sidenote.<\/div> Our methodology isn\u2019t perfect here, as there\u2019s no way to identify fat-heads and long-tails with 100% certainty. Learn more here<\/a>. <\/div>\n

Google is slightly less likely to rewrite meta descriptions that truncate<\/h2>\n

Google truncates meta descriptions that are too long.<\/p>\n

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But does this affect the chance of Google rewriting them? In other words, is Google more likely to generate its own snippet when your meta description is too long?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at the data:<\/p>\n

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The results here are pretty much equal. Google rewrote 61.46% of meta descriptions that were too long and 63.69% of the rest.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, it seems that keeping your meta descriptions within limits doesn\u2019t change the probability of Google rewriting them much.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s because long descriptions are surprisingly common. 40.61% of 192,656 unique pages\u2019 descriptions we studied were too long.<\/p>\n

\"10<\/a><\/p>\n

Should you still bother writing meta descriptions?<\/h2>\n

Yes. Relevant and compelling meta descriptions entice clicks, so they\u2019re still worth writing\u2014even though they\u2019re only shown only 37% of the time, on average.<\/p>\n

That said, if your site is huge, it pays to prioritize pages that:<\/p>\n