Quick answer: Yes, both still matter – with evolved jobs. Title tags remain a direct relevance signal and your headline on every surface: search results, AI citations, social shares and browser tabs. Meta descriptions never directly ranked but now serve triple duty as your SERP sales pitch, a frequent source for how AI answers describe your page, and the summary agents skim. Write both for machines quoting you, not just users scanning results.
Title tags: the rules that survived
Keep the primary keyword early and natural; stay roughly within 50-60 characters so nothing important truncates; make every title unique; and lead with the specific promise (“30-Step GEO Checklist” beats “Ultimate Guide to GEO Success”). Google rewrites titles it dislikes – vague, stuffed or duplicated ones most often – so the best defence is a title that already reads like the clean answer to the query.
The AI-era addition
When ChatGPT or Perplexity cites your page, the title is usually the visible label users judge. Titles that state the content’s exact value (“How to Create an llms.txt File (Step-by-Step)”) earn clicks from citations; clever-but-opaque titles waste them. Numbers, years and concrete nouns age well; wordplay does not travel through machine quotation.
Meta descriptions: write them for quotation
150-160 characters, active voice, containing the query’s language and the page’s concrete promise. Two audiences now read them: users on the SERP deciding whether to click, and retrieval systems summarising your page – a tight description frequently becomes the engine’s one-line account of you. Skip writing them only for pages nobody searches; for money pages, a deliberate description is five minutes well spent.
Common failures worth auditing
Sitewide boilerplate appended to every title (brand taglines eating your 60 characters), duplicated descriptions across templates, missing descriptions on key pages (engines then quote random page text), and titles diverging from H1s so far that machines doubt the page’s topic. A quarterly crawl catches all four in minutes – and pairs naturally with checking how engines currently describe your pages via IndexGraph.ai.
FAQ
Do keywords in descriptions help rankings?
Not directly – but matched query terms get bolded on the SERP and improve click-through, which is the metric descriptions exist to move (answer-first writing applies here too).
Adexorb Technologies audits and rewrites title/description layers sitewide as part of on-page sprints.