Do meta descriptions still matter now that AI answers the question?
Last reviewed
Short answer
Yes, but for the reason they always mattered: the meta description controls the snippet a human reads before deciding to click. It is not a ranking factor and it is not part of the AI shopping product feed. Sell it as click-through rate, not as AEO, and be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.
What a meta description is not
It is not a ranking signal. It has not been one for a long time and no amount of AI framing changes that. It is also not one of the required fields in OpenAI's product feed spec, which asks for title, description, price, availability and image.
This matters because meta description optimisation is routinely bundled into AEO packages as though it feeds AI answers. It does not. The product description does. Conflating them is either sloppy or deliberate, and either way it makes the rest of the claims harder to trust.
What it is still good for
Snippets. When your page does appear in a classic search result, the meta description is usually what renders underneath it, and a good one earns a click that a truncated auto-generated one does not. On an ecommerce catalog with hundreds of pages, that compounds.
There is also a second-order argument for filling them: an empty meta description is a reliable indicator that nobody has looked at that product page in a long time, and products with empty metas usually have thin descriptions too.
Practical guidance
Around 155 characters before truncation. Lead with what the product is and its most distinguishing attribute. Include the brand. Do not repeat the title verbatim. Do not stuff.
If you have hundreds of empty ones, this is exactly the kind of job worth automating with review rather than doing by hand or leaving undone. Entitled writes both the title and the meta description to native Shopify SEO fields, which means they persist if you ever remove the app.
Frequently asked questions
Are meta descriptions a ranking factor?
No. They influence whether a human clicks your result, not where the result appears. Any tool selling meta description optimisation as a ranking or AI visibility lever is overstating it.
Do AI assistants read meta descriptions?
They are not part of the published product feed specification, which asks for the product description. An assistant fetching your page at answer time may read whatever is on it, but the meta description is not the field carrying your product data into shopping surfaces.
How long should a meta description be?
Roughly 155 characters before Google truncates it. Shorter is fine if it is complete. Padding to the limit with keywords is worse than a clean 120-character sentence.
Sources
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