Between 20 June and 23 October 2026 our platform analysed 1,645 pages belonging to 25 sites of real clients and projects. These are not pages picked for an experiment: they are the sites people asked us to look at, with everything a real site carries — old pages, duplicate pages, forgotten pages.
We counted three things only, the most elementary ones there are: the title, the meta description and the H1. The result is less obvious than it sounds, and it says something about where the time really goes when you work on a site's SEO.
How we counted (and what this is not)
Every page counts once, even when it was analysed several times: the snapshot used is the most recent one, the page as it was at the moment of analysis. Limits are measured in characters, not bytes: otherwise an accented word would weigh twice as much and an ordinary title would look oversized.
Three honest warnings, before the numbers:
- This is not a statistical sample. These are the sites that came through us, not a random draw from the web.
- One site weighs more than the others: on its own it brings 1,065 of the 1,645 pages, nearly two thirds. That is why, below, the per-site numbers matter more than the overall total.
- These are snapshots: several of these sites have since been fixed, partly starting from these very findings.
The biggest hole is the meta description
711 pages out of 1,645 have no meta description: 43.2%. But the per-site figure tells the real story. Looking at the 15 sites with at least 5 analysed pages:
- the median site has 72% of its pages without a meta description;
- 9 sites out of 15 are missing it on more than half their pages;
- 14 out of 15 are missing at least one.
Four sites out of fifteen do not have a single one, on any page. In those cases it is not an oversight: nobody ever set the field, and the site's theme does not generate it on its own.
Another 40 pages (2.4%) have one but under 70 characters, too short to fill the space Google gives the snippet.
Let us be clear: the meta description is not a ranking factor. Google often rewrites it. But it is the line a person reads before deciding whether to click, and when it is missing Google takes some arbitrary piece of the page — sometimes the navigation menu, sometimes a cookie notice.
Titles: more often too long than absent
The title is almost always there — missing on only 29 pages (1.8%) — but its length is another matter:
- 254 pages (15.4%) have a title over 60 characters, the threshold beyond which search results cut it off;
- 159 pages (9.7%) stay under 30 characters: not an error, but space given away.
The worst site in the set has 79% of its titles out of range; in four others the share sits between 33% and 41%. The median across sites is 18%: roughly one page in five, everywhere.
The H1 rarely goes missing, but where it does it is systematic
Overall, the H1 is absent on 69 pages (4.2%). That looks like a minor problem, and on average it is. Except it is not spread evenly: on one site it is missing on 56% of pages, on another on 41%, on two others between 16% and 20%. On the remaining eleven it hardly ever goes missing.
That is the signature of a theme or a page builder that does not output an H1 for a certain template — a product page, a category page — and repeats it identically across every page of that kind. It is fixed once in the template, not page by page.
Site by site
The fifteen sites with at least five analysed pages, by size. Percentages are over that site's pages.
| Type of site | Pages | No meta description | Title over 60 | No H1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events portal | 1,065 | 25% | 12% | 2% |
| Transport services (NL) | 120 | 100% | 22% | 0% |
| SEO platform (ours) | 82 | 33% | 33% | 0% |
| Financial services (AU) | 76 | 100% | 0% | 4% |
| Training school | 44 | 84% | 34% | 0% |
| Email platform | 38 | 100% | 8% | 0% |
| Florist | 37 | 46% | 35% | 16% |
| Law firm A | 32 | 88% | 41% | 16% |
| Seasonal e-commerce | 32 | 72% | 0% | 56% |
| Financial consulting | 29 | 90% | 3% | 0% |
| Law firm B | 20 | 55% | 35% | 20% |
| Personal site | 19 | 100% | 79% | 0% |
| IT consulting | 17 | 29% | 0% | 41% |
| Atelier | 11 | 45% | 0% | 18% |
| Travel agency | 11 | 0% | 18% | 18% |
One thing stands out: the large site, the one with 1,065 pages, is also the tidiest. Not out of virtue, but because a system fills those fields automatically. The worst sites are the small ones, built by hand, where every page depends on whoever wrote it that day.
The order worth fixing them in
The obvious advice would be "write all the missing meta descriptions". Across 711 pages that is not advice, it is a sentence. The order that makes sense is different:
- Templates first, pages second. If the H1 is missing on 56% of pages, 18 H1s are not missing: one H1 is missing in a template used 18 times. Same for titles generated automatically from one pattern.
- Then only the pages someone sees. Open Search Console, sort by impressions, take the pages that have some. A meta description on a page nobody sees in the results changes nothing for anyone.
- Oversized titles sitting between position 8 and 20. Those are a step away from the first page, where the text shown still makes a difference to whether someone clicks.
- The rest, whenever. Really.
What these numbers do not say
They do not say that fixing the meta description lifts clicks. This is a count of how pages were built, not a measure of effect.
And here is something you do not usually read elsewhere. After every declared change, our platform measures clicks over the 28 days before and the 28 days after. Across 91 measured changes so far, none produced a clear verdict: 55 closed as "not enough data", 25 as "disturbed period", 11 as "too early". The reason is simple and holds for anyone doing this work: on a page that gets ten impressions a month, no before/after can say anything. The noise is larger than the signal.
Anyone promising you that "the optimised title brought +18% clicks" on pages like these is reporting noise. We prefer to say we do not know yet, and to keep measuring where the numbers are big enough to speak.
Running the same count on your site
The same three checks take a minute on any site: title, meta description and H1 of every page reachable from the sitemap. The free audit runs them without registration and tells you how many pages are out of range, and which. If you then want to know whether the changes actually worked, that takes the next step — connecting Search Console and measuring before and after — with all the limits we just described.