A meta description is an HTML attribute providing a brief summary of a page’s content — displayed as the snippet beneath the title in search results. AI systems use it as a content signal alongside the title tag and page body.
Meta descriptions are retrieval signals as much as click drivers. An entity-explicit, factually dense meta description — one that states clearly what the page covers and who it is for — helps AI systems understand a page’s relevance to specific queries before fully processing the body content. For service pages and entity pages, meta descriptions should function as self-contained summary statements that AI systems can extract and use.