The Renaissance of the Meta Description: A Hamsterdam History Lesson

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to another edition of Hamsterdam History!

This is a series of posts where we look at “vintage” SEO articles to celebrate their contributors, gain historical knowledge, and discuss how things have changed (or haven’t) since.

In this edition, we’re revisiting the humble meta description.

This was inspired by a post I was reviewing from August 4, 2009 by Ann Smarty for Search Engine Journal called “Optimizing the Page Search Result Snippet: On-Page Tactics.”

In the article, Ann mentions that a “Meta description is the first thing to work on when trying to optimize your page search results snippet.”

She explains that a good meta description should be “informative, descriptive, concise, and encourage a click.” It should also “be keyword optimized.”

What got me interested in writing about meta descriptions isn’t search snippets, though. It’s the role they can play in your brand’s AI visibility in 2026.

But before we get into all of that, let’s review what a meta description is.

A meta description can help you influence your search snippet in search results, like on Google.

As Google explains in their snippet documentation:

“Google primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet. We may also use descriptive information in the meta description element when it describes the page better than other parts of the content.”

How often your meta description will be used in a snippet varies depending on the query and what the best source of information for the snippet is. (It may be a segment of text from the page, for example.)

According to a study done in 2020 by Ahrefs, looking at desktop results for 20,000 keywords, “Google rewrites meta descriptions 62.78% of the time.”

Meta descriptions also are not a Google ranking factor.

Some SEOs used to advise skipping writing meta descriptions entirely, spending that time on other efforts, and simply letting Google select the snippet from the page.

I’ve always been in favor of writing meta descriptions because it gives you a chance, albeit a small one, to influence how your page is perceived in search results.

But meta descriptions aren’t just important for search snippets today. They can also play a role in determining whether your page is chosen by an AI assistant to be part of its answer.

The way ChatGPT grounds its answers, for example, seems to be that it fetches a list of links, then it chooses which pages to prioritize for crawling based on factors like URL slugs, titles, and snippets, which can include meta descriptions (and maybe publish dates).

This is theoretical and not formally documented, but it means, all things being equal, that your meta description could be a factor (an additional relevance signal or useful summary) on whether your page gets selected to be part of an AI-generated answer.

In terms of tips for writing meta descriptions …

Keep them concise (around 160 characters is a general guideline, but not a hard-and-fast rule), make them unique to each page, and explain the page’s overall purpose.

Think of your meta description as if you’re pitching the page to ChatGPT to be selected. You won’t win with keyword stuffing or overly promotional language; rather what’s going to matter is being helpful and descriptive.

Conclusion

Despite their getting attention back in 2009, meta descriptions were often deprioritized in later years because Google frequently generated query-specific snippets from the page itself.

But in the age of AI assistants, meta descriptions are having a renaissance, as they can provide a concise summary of a page that may help search and AI systems understand its purpose.

So if you’re debating on whether to invest resources in writing quality meta descriptions, consider that they can play a role in both your organic search CTR and your AI visibility (not to mention previews for social sharing when an OG description isn’t available).

Outro

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Hamsterdam History!

Stay tuned for another edition soon, or check out related history articles below.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing!

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Related history posts: