When Google writes your page summary, residents pick the wrong link

On a Google results page, a resident sees your page title and, under it, a short piece of text. That text helps them decide which link will let them pay their council tax or check their bin day. When the page has a good description, it usually tells them what they can do on the page.

Most council pages already have a description that does this job. But about a third of the pages we check have none, or one so short it says very little. When that happens, Google picks text from the page itself. That might be a menu, a cookie message, a date or half a sentence. The resident cannot tell whether this is the page they need, so they may pick another result, go back to search, or phone you.

It is common: about two councils in three have at least one key page to look at. It turns up across every type of council. Metropolitan districts and councils in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland tend to have more pages to fix, and London boroughs and unitary councils tend to have fewer.

Pages for reporting a road problem are among the most likely to be missing a description. Busy pages such as bin collections, council tax and school places are affected too. Parking permit pages are the most likely to have a good one.

Most of the time, nobody decided to leave the description out. The usual causes are:

• The field is optional. Many content management systems have a summary or description field that editors can skip. Under time pressure, they do.
• The description is too short. A few words, such as a single line on how to apply for a Blue Badge, can fall below the length search engines find useful. It looks fine to the editor but gives residents little to go on.
• Content was moved from an old site. When pages are copied to a new system, descriptions are often left behind, or never existed in the first place.
• The template does not use the field. Sometimes editors fill in a summary, but the page template never turns it into a description that search engines can read.
• The page sits on another platform. Online forms, bin day lookups and planning portals are often run by a supplier, and their pages may have no description at all.