Meta descriptions are present

When a page has no meta description Google fabricates one by extracting text near the first keyword match — often pulling a cookie-consent snippet, a nav label, or a truncated mid-sentence fragment. That auto-generated snippet is what a prospect sees next to your blue link in search results and in every social-card preview, and it is almost never on-message. A page with a copied-and-pasted description across all routes is functionally the same problem: Google deduplicates identical descriptions and falls back to the same extraction behavior. AI coding tools routinely omit description because Next.js's metadata API treats it as optional and many scaffold templates only set title. LinkedIn, Slack, iMessage, and Discord all pull from the same <meta name="description"> (or the og:description derivative), so missing this field also makes every shared link look broken or empty.

  export const metadata = {
    title: 'About Us — Acme',
    description: 'Acme builds tools for indie developers. Founded 2024 in Brooklyn.',
  }

Deeper remediation guidance and cross-reference coverage for this check lives in the seo-fundamentals Pro audit — run that after applying this fix for a more exhaustive pass on the same topic.

• ID: project-snapshot.seo.meta-descriptions-present
• Severity: medium
• What to look for: Same enumeration as title check. For each page, check for a meta description via metadata.description (Next.js), <meta name="description"> in head, or framework equivalent. Count pages with vs. without.
• Pass criteria: At least 80% of pages declare a meta description.
• Fail criteria: More than 20% missing meta descriptions.
• Skip (N/A) when: Project has no rendered pages.
• Do NOT pass when: Descriptions are set but copy-pasted across all pages — that's not "having descriptions" for SEO purposes. (This check accepts duplicates but flag in detail.)
• Report even on pass: "Found N pages; M have meta descriptions. Coverage: M/N = X%. Notable: K pages share an identical description."
• Detail on fail: "5 of 14 pages missing meta description (36%); examples: app/blog/[slug]/page.tsx, app/products/[id]/page.tsx".
• Remediation:

  export const metadata = {
    title: 'About Us — Acme',
    description: 'Acme builds tools for indie developers. Founded 2024 in Brooklyn.',
  }