Skip to main content
SEO Auditor — validates that the HTML meta description is present and within the recommended 150–160 character range.

SEO

Descriptions that search engines can display in full and that summarize the page.

Click-through

Search snippets use a unique, readable summary instead of a truncated or invented excerpt.
The HTML meta name=description is the snippet search engines often show under the title in results. This auditor fetches the page, extracts description tags with jsoup, and checks presence, emptiness, length bands, and duplicate tags.

​
How it works

The auditor loads the audited URL and evaluates meta[name=description] elements:
  1. Fetch — requests the HTML with jsoup (including HTTP Basic Auth when provided).
  2. Extract — reads document.select("meta[name=description]"), uses the first tag’s content attribute after trim, and counts how many description tags exist.
  3. Rules — applies missing, empty, far-too-short (1–119), far-too-long (over 180), and duplicate-tag checks (FAIL), then slightly short (120–149) and slightly long (161–180) checks (WARNING). Length rules are skipped when the description is missing or empty.
  4. Aggregate — any FAIL rule wins over WARNING; if every rule passes, the audit is SUCCESS.
Fetch errors (unreachable host, invalid URL) produce an ERROR response rather than a description finding.

​
What it audits

Every row maps to one checkRule* method and one CheckCode. CheckCode suffixes use status ranges: 200 success, 300–399 warning, 400–499 fail.

​
Output documentation

​
Risks and considerations

​
Search visibility

  • Missing or empty meta descriptions force search engines to invent a snippet, which often mismatches the page and lowers click-through.
  • Descriptions over 160 characters are typically truncated in SERPs; over 180 characters are almost never shown in full.
  • Very short descriptions (under 120 characters) waste snippet space and give users little reason to click.

​
Uniqueness and intent

  • Duplicate meta name=description tags leave crawlers guessing which value to use. Keep a single tag whose content matches this page.
  • Reusing the same generic description across many URLs collapses rankings and analytics into one unhelpful snippet.

​
Whitespace and encoding

  • Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed before length is measured; a description of only spaces is treated as empty.
  • Character count is the Java string length of the trimmed content attribute, not a pixel-width estimate used by some SERP renderers.
  • Only the first meta[name=description] is measured; extra description tags are flagged separately and otherwise ignored.