Meta Title and Description Length Checker

How it works

• Width is measured in Arial — the font Google renders results in — using Arial’s own published advance widths, at 20px for titles and 14px for descriptions.
• That matters because Google truncates on rendered width, not on characters. A 55-character title full of capitals and Ws can be cut while a 70-character title of narrow letters fits, and a character counter cannot tell you which you have.
• The preview applies the same measurement to show where the cut falls on desktop and on mobile, breaking at a word boundary the way Google does.
• Alongside the measurement, the tool flags the mistakes that waste width: double spaces, too many separators, a description that just repeats the title, and emoji that get stripped but still cost space.

Use cases

Why pixel width beats character count

Google truncates a title when its rendered width exceeds the space available, not when it passes a character count. The two diverge sharply because letters are not equally wide. In Arial, the font Google renders desktop results in, a capital W has an advance width of 944 units per em and a lowercase i has 222 — more than four times narrower. A title of 55 wide characters can be cut while a title of 70 narrow ones fits with room to spare.

This is why the familiar "keep it under 60 characters" advice fails unpredictably. It is a rough average that happens to work for mixed-case English prose and breaks for anything else: brand names in capitals, titles with numbers, German compound nouns, or a heading full of Ms and Ws. The measurement here uses Arial’s own published advance widths, so what you see is the actual rendered width rather than a proxy for it.

The same logic applies to meta descriptions, measured at 14px instead of 20px. One practical consequence: a description that fits on desktop can still be cut on mobile, where the available width is narrower, so both are shown separately above.

Writing for truncation you cannot fully control

Two things make exact measurement less decisive than it sounds. First, Google appends your site name to many titles, which eats width you did not budget for. Second, and more significantly, Google rewrites titles and descriptions for a large share of queries — usually substituting a heading from the page or a passage that matches the search more closely than your description does.

That does not make the exercise pointless, but it does change the goal. Aim for comfortable rather than maximal: a title around 500 to 560 pixels leaves headroom for an appended site name and for the next layout change. Make the first half of the title carry the meaning, so that a truncation loses detail rather than the point. And treat the description as the version that shows for branded and exact-intent searches, which are the ones most likely to convert.

The thresholds this tool uses are observed truncation points, not figures Google publishes. They have moved several times and will move again, which is the strongest argument for headroom.

What to fix first when a snippet looks wrong

When a search result reads badly, the cause is usually one of a short list of mechanical problems rather than the writing itself. Check them in order of how much they cost.

First, truncation mid-sentence. This reads as careless and costs clicks directly, and it is entirely within your control. Second, a description that repeats the title almost word for word: the snippet then carries one idea where it could carry two, which wastes the most valuable space on the page. Third, separator clutter. A title broken up by three or four pipes and dashes reads as a breadcrumb rather than a statement, and each separator costs pixels you could spend on words.

Lower down the list, but still worth fixing: double spaces, which waste width and look like an error; all-caps words, which are far wider than mixed case and are frequently rewritten by Google; and emoji in titles, which usually get stripped from the rendered result while still occupying width. The checks above flag all of these so you can work through them rather than guessing which one is hurting.

FAQ