Consistent Title Format and a Written Description
MUST: Every page needs a `<title>` in one site-wide format (`${page} — ${SITE_NAME}`), with the distinctive word FIRST — results truncate around 60 characters, so a stuffed title loses the product name, the one word a human was scanning for. Shareable or searchable pages SHOULD also ship a hand-written `<meta name="description">` of ~150-160 plain-text characters; skip it and the engine writes one from whatever body copy came first, usually a cookie banner or a skip link. (Distinct from `content-page-titles`, which is the title tracking in-app context.)
Every page needs a title in one site-wide format, short enough to survive truncation, plus a description you wrote instead of one the crawler invents
Bad
Good
Why it matters
From the title and description rules in ibelick's fixing-metadata skill. Distinct from content-page-titles, which is about the title tracking in-app context as the user navigates; this is the site-wide template and the description that ships with the document. Three things go wrong together. Titles get stuffed — `Home | Best Free AI Tools 2026 | Fast | Cheap | MyApp` — and the search result truncates at roughly 60 characters, so the keywords survive and the product name, the one word a human was scanning for, is the part that gets cut.
Titles drift, because each page invents its own separator and word order, and a site whose results do not look like they came from the same site reads as untrustworthy. And the description is skipped, which does not mean no description: it means the engine writes one for you, scraped from whatever body copy came first, which is usually a cookie banner or a skip link.
The rule reduces to one template (`${page} — ${SITE_NAME}`), the distinctive word first, and a plain-text description of about 150-160 characters written on purpose.