Has meta description (>= 50 chars)
The meta description is what agents use as the page summary when they need a quick representation that's smaller than the full body. A short or missing description means agents either fall back to scraping the body or skip the page entirely in summary lists.
How the check decides
The check reads the content attribute of <meta name="description">, trims whitespace, and asserts the length is at least 50 characters. Fails if the tag is missing or its trimmed content is shorter.
How to implement it
Author a one- or two-sentence description for every page. 50 characters is a low floor; 120–160 is closer to the real sweet spot for both agents and search engines.
Pass
<meta name="description"
content="Install a14y in under a minute and audit your first documentation site against scorecard v0.2.0.">
Fail
<meta name="description" content="Install page">