Titles and descriptions: the tags that decide the click

What a search engine actually shows, why it rewrites your title, and how to audit metadata across a whole site instead of page by page.

SEO · Published: 22 August 2026 · 3 min read · Ольга Мирошник

A title tag is not a header. It is an advertisement that competes with nine others on the same screen, and it is the only part of your page most people ever read. On a site of any size the metadata quietly rots: templates duplicate, pages get copied, a migration wipes half the descriptions.

What actually gets shown

Search engines rewrite titles on roughly a third of queries. They do it when the title is stuffed with keywords, when it repeats the brand twice, or when it says nothing about the query. The way to keep your own wording is to make it the best available option: specific, front-loaded, one idea.

• 50–60 characters. Longer is not penalised, it is truncated.
• The distinguishing word first. "Winter tyres 205/55 R16" beats "Online store — buy tyres".
• Brand at the end, once. A separator and the site name is enough.

Descriptions are not a ranking factor and never have been. They are a click factor: the snippet is what the reader compares against the other results. Write the sentence that answers the query, not a summary of the page.

The four failures worth hunting

Duplicates. Two hundred product pages sharing one title is the most common finding on an e-commerce site, and it is always a template that forgot a variable.

Empty descriptions. The engine then quotes whatever text it finds first — often a cookie notice or a navigation label.

Titles from the CMS. Home | Home | My Site survives for years because nobody looks at the tab.

Open Graph missing. Shared links then show a grey box, and the click-through on social drops for a reason nobody attributes to markup.

Auditing at site scale

Checking metadata by hand works for a landing page and fails at a hundred. The pattern that scales:

for each crawled page:
  title.length, description.length
  hash(title) → count duplicates
  og:title, og:image present?
  canonical == self?

That is a crawl, not a spreadsheet. Run it after every release and the class of problem disappears — a template regression is caught while it is still one page, not two thousand.

Canonical, briefly

Half of "duplicate title" findings are actually one page reachable at four URLs: with and without a trailing slash, with and without ?utm_source. Fix the canonical and the duplicates resolve themselves.

The check that pays for itself

Sort your pages by traffic, take the top fifty, and read their snippets as a stranger would. If a snippet does not say what the page gives you, no ranking improvement will save it — the click goes to whoever wrote a clearer sentence.