The coverage audit
The audit is the free part of Metaly and the argument for the rest of it. It is worth knowing exactly what it counts.
What is counted
Published content only, in the post types you chose under Settings. Drafts, private posts and trashed items are not counted — they are not in search results, so a missing description on one is not a gap.
Why a page with a description can be "missing" one
This is the question people ask first. Your SEO plugin has templates: when you have not written a meta description, most of them generate one from the post excerpt or the opening of the content, and that generated text is what appears in your page source.
Metaly counts the field you wrote, not the fallback your SEO plugin rendered. A description templated from the first sentence of the page is not a written meta description, and counting it as coverage would make an unoptimised site look perfectly covered — which is the one thing an audit must never do.
So a page can render a description in its
<head> and be correctly reported here as missing
one. Both are true.
Live counts and background counts
On Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress and on sites with no SEO plugin, the metadata lives in WordPress's own postmeta, and coverage is a pair of indexed queries per post type. Those numbers are counted fresh every time you open the screen, so they are never stale.
All in One SEO keeps metadata in its own table behind its own model class, and there is no way to ask it about every post at once. On a 4,200-product catalogue that means thousands of queries, so those sites get a background count instead, and the screen tells you when it was taken and offers to recount.
An All in One SEO site that has never been counted shows no numbers at all, rather than zeroes. Zeroes would read as "nothing is missing" when the truth is "nothing has been counted", and those are opposite statements.
Whether writing reaches your pages
The coverage screen also reports whether the last SEO plugin check found that writes actually reach your published pages — because every number on that screen is only as good as the write path behind it. Metadata that saves correctly and never renders is the failure this product is most likely to have, and until it was surfaced here the only way to discover it was to run a batch and find your pages unchanged.
A site that has never run the check reads as unchecked, not as broken. That is the state of every new install, and it links straight to where you can run one — see Supported SEO plugins for what the check proves.
Checking a number
Every count on the coverage screen links to Missing metadata, filtered to that post type and field: the actual list of pages behind the number, each linking to its editor so you can write one by hand if you would rather.