A snippet is the description of a page shown below the URL in an organic search result that helps show how it relates to the search query.
While webmasters can take an advantage of this by customizing their website's meta description, an attribute within meta tags that helps describe the contents of pages to search engines, it was limited to just 160 characters.
This is certainly enough for most websites, but to some however, they just need more characters.
To allow websites to get better advantage of meta description, Google has confirmed that it has made a change to how it displays snippet in its search results.
As a result, the description snippet on Google's SERP has become a bit longer.
In the previous weeks, Google has grown the number of characters on its snippets, up from 160 characters to almost 230 characters on average.
Internet users can find meta description of any web page by right-clicking on the page and selecting "view source" or "view page source".
This information has a few purposes, one of which is to serve as the snippet of text on the SERP when searchers perform a search query that your page ranks for. The meta description should give search engines a way to briefly describe the content of a page.
In terms of SEO, webmasters may consider updating their meta description as Google Search is allowing more characters on its snippets. However, Google is not recommending such action, as snippets are more often dynamically generated based on the user query and content found in both the meta description and the content visible on the page.
So if Google is really wanting to fetch longer snippets from a web page, it's able to pull more results by scanning the page's contents