Short meta descriptions - those under 50 characters - fail to make full use of the snippet space in search results. A description like “Welcome to our site” provides no useful information and gives users no reason to click. Search engines may even ignore overly short descriptions and generate their own.

This guide shows you how to find every page with a short meta description using the crawler.sh CLI.

Step 1: Install crawler.sh CLI

Install the CLI with a single command:

curl -fsSL https://install.crawler.sh | sh

This downloads the correct binary for your operating system and architecture, places it in ~/.crawler/bin/, and adds it to your PATH. Restart your terminal or run source ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc) to pick up the new PATH entry.

Verify the installation:

crawler --version

Step 2: Crawl the target website

Run a full crawl of the website you want to audit:

crawler crawl https://example.com

The crawler records each page’s meta description. Results are saved as an NDJSON file (.crawl) in the current directory. For larger sites:

crawler crawl https://example.com --max-pages 5000

Step 3: Run SEO audit

Run the SEO analysis on your crawl data:

crawler seo example-com.crawl

The short descriptions check flags any page where the meta description is under 50 characters.

Step 4: Identify short descriptions

Look for the Short Descriptions section in the SEO report. Common examples include:

Placeholder text left by developers (“Description here”, “TBD”)
Descriptions that only repeat the page title
Auto-generated snippets from CMS plugins that truncate too aggressively
Brand-only descriptions (“Company Name - Official Site”)

Step 5: Fix and re-crawl

Expand each short description to between 50 and 160 characters. A good meta description:

Summarizes what the user will find on the page
Includes relevant keywords naturally
Gives a reason to click (benefit, feature, or call to action)
Reads as a complete, coherent sentence

After fixing, re-crawl to verify:

crawler crawl https://example.com
crawler seo example-com.crawl

Why short descriptions matter for SEO

Google displays up to about 155 characters of a meta description in search results. Descriptions under 50 characters use less than a third of that space, leaving your listing looking sparse compared to competitors. Longer, well-written descriptions increase click-through rates and help search engines understand your page content better. Expanding short descriptions is a low-effort improvement with measurable impact on organic traffic.