It is a clean split: no for ranking, yes for the click. Google does not use the meta description as a ranking factor and has said so for years, most recently reaffirmed through 2026. The words you put in it carry no weight in deciding where your page sits on the results page. What the description does is fill the snippet under your link and try to win the click.
So its value lives entirely on the click side. A clear, accurate, compelling description gets more people to choose your result over the others sitting at the same position, the way a good line of ad copy does. That click is where the worth is. And there is an indirect thread back to performance: sustained click behavior and engagement can feed into how Google judges your result over time. But that is a downstream effect of winning clicks, not the description reaching into the ranking math. The description earns the click; the click, over time, can speak for the page. The text itself never ranks it.
This is exactly the distinction that the catch-all line “meta descriptions matter for SEO” smears over. They matter, but for the click, not the position, and saying so is the entire point. Treating the description as a ranking lever leads people to stuff it with keywords, which does nothing for rank and makes the snippet read worse to the human it is actually for.
Two things worth knowing in passing: Google rewrites the description much of the time when it thinks another snippet better fits the query, and a description that oversells what the page delivers wins the click and then loses it to a fast bounce back to the results. So stop writing the description to please the ranking algorithm and write it to earn the click, because winning the click is the only job it actually has.