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seo/description-presence · Description presence

Every route should include a <meta name="description">.

Severity: warning

What it checks

Every route must include a <meta name="description"> tag (own or inherited through the layout chain). A missing or empty description meta tag is flagged.

Why it matters

A meta description is the snippet search engines show under your title; without one they invent one from page text, often poorly.

critical is reserved for rules where the finding is either deploy-blocking (a crash, a security leak) or, for SEO, the one signal search engines always need (seo/title-presence). A description is different: Google explicitly says it only “sometimes” uses the provided description for the search snippet, generating one from page content the rest of the time. That makes a missing description a real but non-blocking issue: warning, alongside seo/og-image and seo/canonical-url, not the deploy-blocking tier.

How to fix

Add a <meta name="description"> in <svelte:head>, or set the description on your meta component:

<svelte:head>
  <meta name="description" content="A concise page summary." />
</svelte:head>

Mode differences

Source analysis (the CLI, the dashboard’s static baseline) composes each route’s <head> from <svelte:head> in the page and its layout chain, followed into repo-local components, plus the known meta components (svelte-meta-tags, svelte-seo) and any you declare in metaComponents. A value it cannot read literally ({data.title}) is dynamic, judged by treatDynamicAs. Rendered analysis (the Vite plugin’s build pass, a route you visit in the dashboard) reads the shipped <head>, where every value is literal and treatDynamicAs does not apply; the build pass covers prerendered routes only. When the two disagree, trust the rendered result.

Disabling

Record existing findings in the suppressions file (npx svelte-vitals --update-suppressions), scope the rule per route or path with overrides, or turn it off:

export default {
  rules: {
    'seo/description-presence': 'off'
  }
};