Google rewrites 62.78% of meta descriptions, according to a study of 20,000 keywords that Ahrefs published in 2020. The number gets quoted as a reason to stop writing them. The same study found a quarter of top-ranking pages with no meta description at all, which sounds like the second half of the same argument.
Both figures leave out the part that matters to a site owner. In the remaining 37% of cases Google shows the description as written, and Bing and the AI search engines quote a page before a human ever opens it. For a WordPress site with 400 posts the question is not whether to write descriptions. The question is who writes them.
What Google says it does with the tag
Google's own documentation on snippets is less dismissive than the study makes it sound. "Snippets are primarily created from the page content itself," the Search Central page on snippet control states, before adding that Google "sometimes uses the meta description HTML element if it might give users a more accurate description of the page than content taken directly from the page."
The rewrite is a fallback for descriptions that fail. One that repeats the title gets replaced by a sentence from the body, and so does one copied across a whole category, which the same page addresses directly: "identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in search results." On length the guidance is loose. There is no cap, and the snippet "is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width."
Yoast, whose plugin runs on 10 million sites by the WordPress.org count, translates the truncation into a working number. Its guide on meta descriptions, updated by Edwin Toonen on June 23, 2025, recommends "up to 155 characters" and concedes the same limit of control: "Sometimes, it shows the meta description, and sometimes, it just grabs some sentences of your copy or generates something itself."
The empty tag is the common case
Michal Pecánek, who wrote the Ahrefs study, measured a weak correlation of 0.28 between having a description and ranking position. The figure is the counterargument to any claim that descriptions move rankings, and it holds. A description changes what the result says, not where it sits.
What happens when the tag is empty depends on the SEO plugin. Prime SEO, the plugin developed by the author, falls back to the post excerpt, and when the excerpt is empty too it prints the opening 25 words of the body. Most plugins do something similar, so the snippet starts mid-sentence, with a greeting to regular readers or a cookie notice. On a site where the excerpt field has never been used, that fallback is what searchers read for every post.
The free version of Prime SEO counts those posts on its dashboard, under Needs Attention, and its SEO score includes a check for a description between 120 and 160 characters. The count is usually larger than the owner expects. A blog that has published twice a week since 2019 holds about 700 posts, and at a few minutes per description written by hand, with the post open, the backlog is a working week.
Six fields in one click, a site in one run
Version 1.2.1 of Prime SEO Pro, released on September 23, 2026, ships the option the backlog needs. A Generate All button in the post editor writes six fields at once: the SEO title, the meta description, and the Open Graph and Twitter title and description, each cut to its own limit (155 characters for the meta description). The text comes from the post content and the focus keyword when one is set. The Bulk Generator runs the same generation over every post that is missing a title or a description, with a progress bar, a pause button and a stop button.
Since 1.2.1 the generations run through the plugin's own service. A Pro license includes 500 generations a month, where one generation is one Generate All click, one post in a bulk run, or one Content Score analysis, and the counter with its reset date sits in AI Settings. No OpenAI account is needed. Sites that want more, or a different model, paste their own OpenAI key on the same page; the limit is then gone, and the request travels from the site to OpenAI directly.
The generated text is a draft, not a verdict. Google will still rewrite the ones that read like every other page, and the 37% that survive are the ones that say what the page contains in words the searcher used. Pro subscriptions to the plugin have doubled since the start of September 2026, and the bulk run is the feature new subscribers open first.
If three posts in four on a site show an opening sentence as the snippet, the choice in 2026 is between a week of writing and an afternoon of reviewing. Prime SEO is free on WordPress.org; Generate All and the Bulk Generator are part of Pro, $59 a year with a 14-day trial and no card.
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