This is something about which there has been growing consensus over the last 10 years. Google denies that meta descriptions play any role in ranking and testing bears that out. Which means that the benefit of crafting your own meta description would mainly be in shaping the message that Google shows to users when your website appears in search results. If it’s a good message your clickthrough rate might increase.

Except data from the last few years contradicts this:

• Google writes its own description over the one you provided at least 60% of the time, possibly more
• There’s also evidence from this study that replacing your meta descriptions with blanks might actually increase your clickthrough rate

Rather than remove descriptions altogether, here’s what we’d recommend:

• If you’re launching a new website it is probably still worth taking a small amount of time on meta descriptions as there’s a fresh index
• Likewise, if you’re launching an important page with little text, it could use a description. However, a page with little text is unlikely to rank well anyway unless Google has some other signals that might cause the page to rank, such as a lot of links pointing to it
• If you’re launching some new pages on your main website, you may not want to bother with a meta description, especially if you have to hand-write it
• If you have lots pages that use the same template (eg. product pages) then it’s not really much effort to keep them and/or test them
• Ultimately the best test of what works best for your website is one you run yourself, not an industry test, so we’d recommend running some testing too
• None of this applies to SEO meta titles except the need to test them. These are very important and will continue to be, so you should have a unique one for all current and new pages