If you run a website, the title tag and meta description are the two lines of text a stranger reads before deciding to visit you. Write them badly and the best part of your title is replaced by "..." or your description trails off mid-sentence. This guide explains why that happens, what we measure to predict it, and how to check your own pages in a minute.
Why character counts mislead
Most advice says "keep titles under 60 characters and descriptions under 160". It is a decent rule of thumb, and it is wrong often enough to matter. Search results are drawn in a proportional font, so letters take different amounts of horizontal space. An "i" is narrow. A "W" or "M" is wide. Capital letters are wider than lowercase ones.
That means two titles with the same character count can have very different widths. A title full of capitals and wide letters can be cut off at 50 characters, while one made of narrow letters can run past 70 and still fit. Search engines truncate by the space available, not by counting letters. Pixel width is the thing to measure.
What we measure, and what we do not claim
Our checker measures the rendered width of your title and description using the Arimo font, which has the same glyph widths as Arial, at the sizes desktop search results use: 20 px for titles and 14 px for descriptions. We then compare the result with two thresholds:
- Titles: 580 px.
- Descriptions: 920 px.
These numbers are measured, not Google limits. Google publishes no pixel limits for titles or descriptions, and it may change how it draws results at any time. Our thresholds are heuristics based on measured glyph widths. They are good for predicting truncation, and they are versioned in the checker so a change is never silent. Treat a title just under the line as safe and a title far over it as likely to be cut. Treat anything in between as a judgement call.
Two more things to know. Search engines sometimes rewrite your title or description entirely, choosing text from the page that better matches the query. No tag guarantees what is shown. And the checker also flags a title under 10 characters and a description under 70 characters as too short to do much work.
Writing a title that fits
- Put the words people search for near the start. If the end gets cut, you lose the least important part.
- Keep the brand name short, and put it last. A long brand suffix eats the width you need for the page topic.
- Avoid runs of capital letters. "FREE SHIPPING ON ALL ORDERS" takes far more width than the same words in sentence case.
- Give every page its own title. Duplicate titles across a site make pages hard to tell apart in results.
- Write for the reader first. A title that reads like a list of keywords may fit, but it will not earn the click.
Writing a description that fits
A description gives you roughly one and a half to two lines of space on desktop. Use that space to say what the page offers and why it is worth opening.
- Lead with the useful part. The first sentence is the one most likely to be shown in full.
- Write one or two complete sentences instead of a keyword list.
- Say something specific: a number, a feature, or a plain statement of what the visitor gets.
- Do not repeat the title word for word. The description is the second line of your pitch, not an echo of the first.
- Make it different on every page. Pages that share a description tend to be shown with text pulled from the body instead.
Checking your pages
The fastest route is the meta tag checker. Paste a URL and you get a report on the title, description, and the rest of the head tags. It is free, needs no signup or email, and allows 10 checks per day per IP address.
For a closer look at how a result will be drawn, use the SERP preview tool. It draws your title and description at the measured widths, so you can see where the cut falls before you publish. If you only care about the description, the meta description checker focuses on that one tag, and the Open Graph checker covers the tags used when your link is shared on social sites. Our companion guide on Open Graph and Twitter card tags explains those in detail.
One detail about how the check reads your page: it reads the raw HTML your server returns, the same document a social scraper or a simple crawler receives. It does not run JavaScript. If your site sets its title in the browser after the page loads, the checker reports what is in the raw HTML, which is what many tools will see too. That is useful information, and it is usually a sign the tag should be moved into the server response.
A short workflow
- Run your most important pages through the checker and note which ones the report flags as too long, too short, missing, or duplicated.
- Rewrite the flagged titles first, front-loading the topic and shortening the brand suffix.
- Rewrite descriptions next, leading with the specific benefit.
- Check each page again and look at the preview. Aim for a width under the measured line with a little room to spare.