Meta descriptions are… back?

I’ve seen a bunch of SEO influencer types talking this week about leaked data from ChatGPT showing how their search works. And honestly? I had to laugh.

Meta descriptions matter again.

It turns out ChatGPT is using meta descriptions pretty heavily in it’s process when it runs a search. And meta descriptions being relevant again is absolutely hilarious to me. Especially since I’ve spent the last few months… you know… building a meta description generation tool.

Here’s how ChatGPT Search actually works

According to Jérôme Salomon from OnCrawl, here’s what happens behind the scenes when ChatGPT fires off its search tool:

1. ChatGPT transforms your prompt into one or more Bing queries
2. Bing sends back search results
3. ChatGPT decides which pages are relevant to the user’s question and then crawls those relevant pages
4. ChatGPT includes the pages it crawled in the answer with inline citations

And what does it use to decide which pages are relevant and should be crawled?

According to OpenAI support, “The decision on which pages to crawl is primarily influenced by the relevance of the title, the content within the snippet, the freshness of the information, and the credibility of the domain.”

In other words - it’s using your title and meta description!

Now optimized meta descriptions won’t get you into Bing’s search results* in the first place, but they’re apparently crucial for making it into that final round – getting your pages actually crawled and included in ChatGPT’s response.

*although I have been told by friends I trust that Bing prioritizes pages with well-structured metadata like titles and descriptions more than Google, so again, meta descriptions MAY play a bigger role than they have for Google search results for a while.

Two ways MetaMonster can help you win

Option 1: Quick and Easy

Our current tool lets you crawl your site and generate meta descriptions for all your pages with literally one click. Perfect if you just want to make sure you’ve got something solid in place. And if you’re using WordPress you can also sync these with your site without any copy and paste.

Option 2: Total Control

Our new grid UI (launching in the next few weeks) gives you complete control over the prompts, lets you add voice and tone context, and helps you create descriptions that sound even more like your brand.

I recorded a video talking about Jerome’s original post and how both of these options work in MetaMonster.

In the video, you’ll see exactly how to:

• Generate meta descriptions with one click using our current tool
• Use our new grid UI for more granular control
• Add voice and tone context to match your brand
• Incorporate primary keywords automatically
• Customize prompts to fit your specific needs

You could do this and get pretty good results with Claude or ChatGPT’s projects features and some prompt engineering. But then you’ll be copying and pasting back and forth between the chat and a spreadsheet for hours. And keeping it all organized is a mess.

The new MetaMonster UI makes this a piece of cake.