Missing meta description or duplicate titles across the site

One code, two independent defects. A page gets it when at least one holds, and at most once, even if both do:

1. A missing meta description: the <meta name="description"> element is absent or empty.
2. A duplicate <title>: at least one other page on the site carries the same title. The comparison ignores case and surrounding whitespace, so “Pricing” and “pricing ” are the same title as far as the check is concerned.

The finding tells you which of the two applies to your page (since 19 September 2026). Until then it read “the page has no meta description, or its title matches other pages”, so on a site where every page shares one title, pages that do have a description read it too. The finding now comes in three forms (description missing; title repeated; both) and always carries the measured values: the length of the meta description in characters and the number of other crawled pages with the same title.

A detail with a practical consequence: this is the only check in the core set that has to look at the whole site at once. A duplicate title cannot be spotted from a single page; you need them side by side. The findings still attach to individual pages rather than the site, so the report shows you exactly which ones. And on a duplicate title every page in the group gets the finding, not just the second one; there is no reason to declare one of them the correct one.

What the check does not do:

• It judges neither the length nor the quality of the description. A two-word meta description passes just like a carefully written sentence. Existence is checked, not content.
• It does not report duplicate meta descriptions, only duplicate <title> elements.
• It does not catch a missing <title>: that is handled elsewhere in the audit.
• It ignores pages with an error status. Only live pages (2xx) are compared, so that an error page cannot found a false duplicate group with its shared title.
• It cannot see descriptions injected by JavaScript after load.

The finding is page-level; severity is warning.

We have no evidence of an effect on whether a language model cites you, neither for meta descriptions nor for duplicate titles. Hence the “effect not demonstrated” class. Both halves do have support elsewhere, though, and it is fair to separate them, because they are not equally strong.

In practice: take duplicate titles seriously and treat missing descriptions as housekeeping. Ten pages titled “Products” is a genuine indexing problem, and being indexed is a necessary condition for appearing in AI (ACC-04, ACC-07). A missing description will not knock you out of anything.

One thing to say outright, because it keeps turning up in guides: meta keywords do not exist. Google has not used them since 2009 and adding them is not worth doing even as insurance. This check does not look at them, and neither does any other.

Duplicate titles first. Go through the groups the report lists and work out why they match. There are usually three causes:

1. The template never inserts the page name and prints only the site name. One template change fixes every page at once.
2. Pagination: ?page=2, ?page=3 and so on share a title. Put the page number into the title, or keep paginated variants out of the index.
3. Filters and sorting: parameter combinations mint hundreds of URLs under one title. Here the answer is a canonical pointing at the unfiltered version (see ACC-04), not rewriting titles.

A good title describes the specific page and makes sense on its own, out of context:

<!-- Wrong: identical across every subpage -->
<title>Our Company</title>

<!-- Right: the specific page first, the brand after it -->
<title>Heat pump servicing | Our Company</title>

Then the descriptions. On a site with thousands of pages there is no point writing them by hand; generate them from what you already know about the page (from the short description for a product, from the standfirst for an article). Save hand-written descriptions for the pages that matter commercially.

<meta name="description" content="Heat pump servicing and scheduled inspections within 48 hours across the region. From £90, engineer on site the next day.">

What to watch out for:

• Do not paste the first paragraph in. Google will often replace such a description with its own snippet anyway, and it gains you nothing.
• Do not write the description for a search engine. A person writes it for a person deciding whether to click. Stuffed keywords make that job worse.
• Around 150 characters is a sensible length. It is not a rule, but longer text gets truncated in the result anyway.
• An empty element is the same as none. <meta name="description" content=""> will not clear the finding, and nor should it.