The forge project page says what the project is and where it lives
A search result, a social card, and the forge’s own project lists show the description and the topics, and none of them render the README. A project with an empty description is findable only by someone who already has the link.
Observable check
the forge project has a non-empty description, at least one topic, and, where the project publishes a documentation site or a package page, a homepage URL pointing at it. Read these from the forge, with gh repo view --json description,homepageUrl,repositoryTopics or the GitLab projects API, rather than inferring them from files in the repository.
Where this comes from
No upstream source. This is oss-kit's own position, and the argument for it is below.
GitHub and GitLab both expose a description, topics, and a homepage URL, and neither documents any of them as required. Observed: a search result, a social card, and a forge's own project lists all render the description and none of them render the README, so an empty description serves a blank answer everywhere the README cannot reach. Retire this rule if forges begin deriving the project description from the README.