B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Recent
61.46%
61.46% -- meta description rewrite rate for Google Search (2025)
61.46% of long meta descriptions (exceeding optimal length) are rewritten by Google in search results.
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
61.46%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2025
Entity
Sample Size
20,000
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
75
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
Ahrefs
Primary
Tier B
https://digitalthriveai.com/en-us/resources/seo/meta-description-study/ ↗
Source Article
Every SEO professional has faced this dilemma: you craft the perfect meta description--concise, compelling, keyword-rich--only to discover Google replaced it with something entirely different in the search results. Is all that effort wasted? New research from Ahrefs analyzing over 20,000 keywords pr…
Original Research
Ahrefs
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Ahrefs study comparing hardcoded meta descriptions vs actual Google snippets across 20,000 keywords
Methodology documented
Trend Over Time
| Period | Value | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 (current) | 63.69% | |
| 2025 (current) | 61.46% | -3.5% |
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
Google Search: 61.46% meta description rewrite rate. Source: Ahrefs (2025). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/google-rewrites-long-meta-descriptions-61-46
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/google-rewrites-long-meta-descriptions-61-46" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>61.46%</strong> -- meta description rewrite rate for Google Search<br><small>Source: Ahrefs (2025) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/google-rewrites-long-meta-descriptions-61-46" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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