Meta Description

The meta description is a short summary of a page, declared in its code, that search engines may show as the grey text beneath the blue link in results. It is not a ranking factor — Google has said so plainly for years — but it is a click factor: at the same position, a snippet that tells the shopper what they'll find and why it's worth their time earns more clicks than one that doesn't. It's the one lever that changes traffic without changing rank.

Google uses your description when it judges it useful and writes its own from the page text when it doesn't, so a generic or duplicated description is effectively no description at all. For a product, the formula is simple: what it is, one reason to buy, and a practical fact the competitor's snippet lacks — handmade in Sweden, ships in two days, free returns — in about 150 characters. Because most platforms generate descriptions from a template, the top sellers deserve hand-written ones; Search Console shows whether Google is using yours or rewriting them, which is a signal the description isn't matching the queries people actually use.