Shopify meta descriptions: why yours is being rewritten
Around 160 characters is the display limit, but Google rewrites most descriptions anyway. The goal is not to control the text — it's to make the rewrite favourable.
The length that actually matters
70–160 characters. Under 70 and Google has nothing to work with, so it pulls a random sentence from the page. Over 160 and it truncates mid-word, which looks broken in the results.
Why Google rewrites it
Google generates a snippet from the page when it thinks it answers the query better. You can't prevent that, but you can make the page contain the sentence you'd want used — in the first paragraph of the description.
The three-line formula
Line 1: what it is and who it's for. Line 2: the differentiator a competitor can't copy in a day. Line 3: what happens after they click (delivery, returns, sizing). No keyword stuffing, no 'best quality'.
Check before you publish
Paste the description into any character counter. If it's over 160, cut the last clause, not the first. The first clause is the one that survives truncation.
Run the free scan → See a sample report
Written by the team that runs SEO Scan Audit. The counts quoted above come from our own crawls of live storefronts; the fixes are the ones we write into paid reports.