Page title & meta description: your search result, in your words

Your title tag and meta description are literally your search result. This check is weight 8 — one of the two heaviest in the search category — because getting it wrong makes every other SEO effort invisible.

What Actuant checks

• A non-empty <title> element — required for a partial or pass.
• A <meta name="description"> with content — needed for a full pass.
• Title present but no description → partial. Neither → fail ("invisible in search results").

Length is scored separately, so you can fail one without failing the other: Title length (weight 3) and Description length (weight 3) check that each one is long enough to be useful and short enough not to be truncated.

Why it matters

If you don't write the title and description, Google guesses — pulling a random sentence from your page or the raw URL. That's your one line of pitch in the search results, wasted. AI answer engines lean on the same tags to describe you.

How to fix it

1. 1

   Write a title under 60 characters

   Say what the product does, not just its name. "Weekly meal plans from your pantry" beats "MealApp".

2. 2

   Write a description under 155 characters

   Say who it's for and the payoff. This is ad copy, not a summary.

3. 3

   Set them in your builder

   Every builder exposes these in page/head settings. In Next.js 16, export a metadata object with title and description from the page or layout.

export const metadata = {
  title: "Weekly meal plans from your pantry",
  description: "Tell it what's in your fridge; get a 7-day plan and a grocery list. Built for people who hate meal-planning.",
};