# Title and summary metadata

> Title and summary metadata: This is how an agent learns what a page is about without opening it. The fix: add a title and meta description.

- Source: /checks/meta
- Site: AgenticWebScore
- Language: English

---
This is how an agent learns what a page is about without opening it.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Check id | `meta` |
| Dimension | Content Accessibility (22%) |
| Tier | Essential — pool 80 pts |
| Weight inside tier | 2 |
| Impact | High |
| Maturity | Adopted — A ratified standard with real deployment. |
| Conditional | No |
| Publishing skill | `page-metadata` |
| Standards | — |

## What is measured

The scanner reads the `<title>` text and the `content` of `<meta name="description">` in the homepage `/` HTML and measures their length. Pass when the title is 50-60 characters and the description 120-160 characters, both non-empty; partial when both are present but one or both fall outside that window (too short to be informative, or long enough to be truncated), or when only one of the two exists; fail when the page has neither a title nor a description.

## Reproduce it yourself

You do not have to take our word for any of this. Run the same measurement against your own domain:

```bash
DOMAIN="https://example.com"
curl -sL "$DOMAIN/" | perl -0777 -ne 'm{<title[^>]*>(.*?)</title>}si and do { my $t=$1; $t=~s/\s+/ /g; print "title(", length($t), "): $t\n" }; m{<meta[^>]*\bname=["\x27]?description["\x27]?[^>]*>}i and print "description: ", $&, "\n"'
```

## The fix

This is the artifact to ship. It is the complete change, not a description of one.

```html
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8" />
  <title>Agent readiness audit for e-commerce teams | Acme Inc</title>
  <meta
    name="description"
    content="Acme audits how well your store serves AI agents: 61 checks across discovery, content, bot access and commerce, each one paired with a copy-pasteable fix."
  />
</head>
```

> Write a distinct description per page: one templated string reused across 500 URLs tells an agent nothing about which page it is reading.

## Related checks

| Check | Tier | Impact | Same skill |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `markdown-negotiation` — Markdown content negotiation | Recommended | Critical | — |
| `headings` — Semantic heading structure | Essential | High | — |
| `jsonld` — JSON-LD structured data | Essential | Critical | — |
| `faq-schema` — FAQ / question-answer schema | Recommended | High | — |
| `breadcrumb` — Breadcrumb / navigation schema | Emerging | Low | — |
| `summary` — Prominent summary block | Recommended | Medium | — |
| `lang` — Language declaration and multilingual access | Recommended | Medium | — |
| `no-js-fallback` — Content that needs no JavaScript | Essential | High | — |