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Missing meta description

meta_description.missing
Priority
Low
Severity
Warning

What we look for

These pages have no meta description (the summary search engines may show under the title), or an empty one.

Why it matters

Search engines then take text from the page for the summary, which may not be the part that persuades someone to click.

How to fix

Write a description of a sentence or two for each page in the CMS or page template, saying what the page offers and why it is worth a visit.

Seen in a real crawl

From a crawl of Millbrook Hardware (the broken fixture), a test site from Raptor’s fixture suite.

Low

2 pages have no summary for search results

  • /soft-404Missing meta description
  • /title-outside-headMissing meta description
Paths on http://127.0.0.1:8001raptor 0.3.0, 17 Oct 2026

Open this finding in that crawl’s report

It also fired on the js-heavy fixture.

Where you’ll see it

The id is stable, and every surface uses it, so it’s the thing to search for or hand to an agent.

Terminal
When it is one of the five findings under Fix first, raptor crawl prints the id under it.
Check: meta_description.missing
crawl.json and the CSV
The crawl JSON names the finding by this id, and so do the CSV and raptor_query.
"check_id": "meta_description.missing"
The HTML report
This link opens the finding in the report, and each finding shows its id.
crawl.html#finding=meta_description.missing
MCP
raptor_findings with this check_id returns the finding in full, with a fix brief ready to paste into a task. If it didn’t fire, it says why.
raptor_findings {
  "job_id": "...",
  "check_id": "meta_description.missing"
}