<b>"Hand-writing every meta description beats auto-generating them."</b>

<b>"Hand-writing every meta description beats auto-generating them."</b>

Depends — and the honest answer annoys both camps.

Here's what actually happens. Google rewrites your meta description in roughly 60-70% of queries anyway, pulling a snippet from body text. So on a 40,000-page programmatic site, hand-writing each one is mostly labor donated to a field that ignores it.

Where manual wins: your 200 money pages, your homepage, anything where the description is the pitch and the click is worth real money. There, a sharp human line moves the needle on the queries Google does respect.

Where templates win: the long tail. A clean variable template — {Product} reviews, specs and {Year} pricing — beats both a blank tag and a tired writer on page 9,000.

The error is picking one religion. Spend manual effort where the snippet survives. Template the rest.

(If you're A/B testing descriptions to "raise CTR," first check how often yours even renders. Often it doesn't.)