When should you use AI summary matches the email?

Run this on any send where it matters which action the reader takes, and on any send with a date attached. Gmail writes its own summary above your message, and a growing share of recipients read that instead of the email — so it is a surface you are judged on without having written a word of it. The check reads your message source for the action you are asking for, the deadline you set and the sender you are, then reads the summary Gmail actually drew and scores one against the other. It is most valuable exactly where the stakes are: a limited-time offer, a registration closing, a single call to action you need followed.

Skip it on sends with no action and no date, where a summary has little to get wrong — a plain announcement or a text-led note will almost always score well and the check spends budget confirming it. It also runs in Gmail only, at desktop and tablet width, because Gmail is the only mail client that draws this card and its mobile web layout has none; if your audience is overwhelmingly on another client, this is not your risk. And it judges the summary, not the email: an email with no call to action at all is a question for the call-to-action check, not this one.

a summary that names the wrong action; a deadline the summary drops or invents; an offer the email never made; the wrong sender credited for the message

A failure means a reader who read only the summary would act differently from one who read your email — they would take the wrong action, miss the deadline, believe something you did not say, or credit the wrong sender. The score is weighted so that the three that change behaviour each fail the check on their own: the action, the deadline, and anything invented. A lower-scoring pass means the summary was imperfect but would not have misled anyone. Nothing here is a defect in your HTML — the finding is about how your message reads when compressed by someone else, and the fix is usually to make the action and the date unmissable in the message itself.

This check has no tunable thresholds. The score is fixed at 80 out of 100, weighted across five things a summary can get wrong, and the weights are what make a wrong action or a missed deadline disqualifying rather than merely costly. A configurable threshold would let a failing summary be configured into a pass without anything about the email changing, which is the one outcome the check exists to prevent. The variables available to you are which widths you render, which are job settings rather than parameters.

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