Canonical URLs, titles and descriptions in an AI-answer world
Canonical URLs consolidate which version of a page gets cited, while the title and meta description supply the summary an engine uses instead of writing its own.
Citations concentrate or scatter
The same content reachable at four URLs — with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, with tracking parameters — splits its citations four ways. An absolute canonical tag consolidates them.
Relative canonicals are a common and quiet bug: they resolve differently depending on the URL that was fetched, which defeats the purpose.
The description is your summary or theirs
Without a meta description, an engine writes its own summary from whatever text it can find — often navigation or boilerplate. With one, you supply the sentence.
50 to 160 characters. One clear sentence about what the page is, not a keyword list.
Titles are still the strongest signal you control
Under 60 characters, specific, front-loaded with the distinguishing part. "Agent Readiness Checker" beats "Tools | Free Utilities | Tregix — Home".
This has been true for twenty years and did not stop being true because the reader changed.
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The free checker runs this check and eighteen others, then generates the files to fix whatever fails.
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