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.

On a route that sends visitors without a session away, the finding is reported as info instead: a crawler has no session, so it only ever sees the redirect or error. Source analysis recognizes a server load, the page’s own or a layout’s above it, that starts with a check on the request’s locals alone, such as if (!locals.user) redirect(…) or error(401). A gate in hooks.server.ts or in the browser is not read, so routes guarded that way keep warning; turn the rule off for them with overrides, or set seo: { indexable: false } for a whole private app. A severity set for the rule in rules applies on these routes too.

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, svead) and any you declare in metaComponents. A value it cannot read literally ({data.title}) is dynamic, judged by treatDynamicAs. A <meta> whose name is an expression (<meta {name} {content} /> inside an {#each}) may be this tag, so it counts as a dynamic one, even when the code building that list sometimes leaves this key out. 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'
  }
};