<b>"Meta descriptions are a ranking factor."</b>

<b>"Meta descriptions are a ranking factor."</b>

They aren't. Google said so on record in 2009 and hasn't walked it back.

Here's what actually happens: the meta description is ad copy for a free ad slot. It does nothing for position. It influences whether the human under the cursor clicks the result you already earned. Those are different jobs, and people who conflate them keyword-stuff a field that the algorithm ignores.

The deeper joke: Google rewrites your description ~70% of the time anyway, pulling a snippet from body text that matches the query better than your hand-tuned sentence. So you're often optimizing a field the user never sees.

Write it for the click. Treat it as expendable. Spend the saved energy on the body copy Google actually quotes.

(If you must measure something, watch CTR in Search Console per query, not per page.)