Meta description updates can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks to appear in search results, depending on how often Google crawls your site. If you just changed the description yesterday, you're likely seeing cached results. Force a re-crawl by submitting the URL through Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool and requesting indexing. The second common culprit is your website itself. Check these technical barriers: page caching plugins (W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket) that haven't been cleared, CDN caches at Cloudflare or similar services, or CMS quirks where the meta description field exists in multiple places and you updated the wrong one. View your page source (right-click, View Page Source) and search for "meta name=\"description\"" to confirm the new text is actually in the HTML Google sees. Even when your meta description is live and Google has crawled it, they may still ignore it. Google rewrites meta descriptions for roughly 70% of search results because they determine their own snippet better matches the user's query. This happens more often when your description is too short (under 120 characters), too long (over 160 characters), stuffed with keywords, or doesn't match what the page actually covers. At Ottawa SEO, we've seen meta descriptions update within 24-48 hours for high-authority client sites that Google crawls daily, but 2-4 weeks for newer domains in the portfolio. If you're managing hundreds of pages, prioritize updating descriptions on your top 20-30 landing pages first rather than wrestling with Google over every single one. If it's been over a month with no change and you've confirmed the HTML is correct, check Google Search Console for crawl errors or manual actions. In rare cases, if Google thinks you're cloaking or serving different content to users versus bots, they'll ignore meta tags entirely. The fix there is broader than just the description.