Meta title and description length checker
Paste a URL. See the title and description a search engine has to work with, how long each one is, and whether it is likely to get cut off.
No account, nothing stored. One page at a time.
The limits that actually apply
Every "correct" number you have read is an approximation, because Google truncates on pixel width, not character count. A title of capital Ms runs out of room far sooner than one of lowercase Is. Character counts are a useful proxy and nothing more.
| Field | Comfortable range | What happens outside it |
|---|---|---|
| Title | 15 to 60 characters | Past roughly 60 it gets cut with an ellipsis. Under about 15 it is usually a template fragment rather than a title. |
| Description | 70 to 160 characters | Past roughly 160 the tail is cut. Under 70 you are leaving persuasion on the table, though short is not a fault in itself. |
Treat the ranges as guidance, not a target to hit exactly. A 52 character title that reads well beats a 60 character one padded to fill the space.
Google rewrites descriptions, so why bother
Because it rewrites them sometimes. Google substitutes its own snippet when it judges yours a poor match for the query, which is common on broad informational searches and much rarer on branded or specific ones. Writing a good description is how you get to keep it.
What it is not is a ranking factor. The meta description does not influence position. It influences whether anyone clicks the position you already have, which is a different and often more useful lever.
What counts as a genuine problem
- Missing entirely. Google will assemble something from the page. Sometimes that is fine, often it is a navigation fragment.
- Duplicated across many pages. The usual cause is a CMS default. It costs you the chance to differentiate every one of those results.
- Truncated mid-sentence. Not fatal, but the cut usually lands on the part you cared about.
- A title that is all brand. "Home | Company Name" spends the most valuable text on the page telling people what they already knew.
What this tool reads
This reads the raw HTML your server sends. If a tag manager or a framework writes your meta tags after load, they will not appear here.
That case is more common than it sounds, and it matters: Google renders pages before indexing, so a description injected by JavaScript usually does get seen, while this tool will report it missing. To check the rendered version, use the Teardown extension, which reads the page in your own tab after everything has run.