Meta description missing or the wrong length
51.5%
of the 3,044 free scans considered in the last 30 days raised this finding. That is 1,567 scans across 1,553 distinct sites. 95% interval 49% to 53.9%.
What it means
The meta description is the summary search engines usually show under the title: without a good one, they invent one from the page instead.
How to fix it
Write a meta description of 140-160 characters that says what the page offers and why to click. If you leave it out, the search engine writes one from whatever text it finds first.
How to check it yourself
View source and search for name="description" in the head. Check whether it exists and whether it falls between about 140 and 160 characters.
What fixed looks like
View source shows a meta description of about 140 to 160 characters describing the page's offer.
How we measured this
Go Voltic scans a site and records which findings it raises. The share above is over every free four-page scan in the last 30 days that loaded at least one page, which is 3,044 scans. Deep scans of paid reports and of the research sweep read a site at a different depth and are a separate population, never in this denominator. It is not a survey and it is not an estimate: it is a count of what our own scanner found. Sites are counted once each in the distinct-sites figure, so a site scanned twice does not weigh double there.
The interval is a 95% Wilson interval. A share printed without its sample size reads as certainty and is indistinguishable from a guess, so both are always shown. Figures on this page were computed on 2026-09-08.
The same share sits beside every other finding on the benchmarks page, which also carries the whole table as CSV and JSON and says how to cite it.
Check your own site
The free scan reads four pages and reports every finding it raises, including this one. It takes about ten seconds and asks for nothing but the address.