"Write better meta descriptions to win more clicks."

"Write better meta descriptions to win more clicks."

Fine. But read this first.

We rewrote meta descriptions for 1,200 blog URLs — benefit-led, with the query echoed in the first 60 characters. Then we logged what Google actually displayed. Result: Google rewrote our description on 62.7% of impressions. For the remaining 37.3% it used what we wrote.

On that 37.3% subset, CTR rose 11% over 28 days. Real, repeatable. On the rewritten majority, no change — obviously.

The lesson isn't "don't write meta descriptions." It's that your ceiling is roughly a third of your pages, and you can't pick which third. Informational queries got rewritten most; transactional and branded queries kept our copy. So spend the effort where Google tends to honor it (product, category, branded) and stop polishing descriptions on how-to posts Google will overwrite anyway.