Free tool
See where your title and description are likely to be cut off
Paste a title tag and meta description and see the width each occupies, on desktop and on a phone. Truncation is decided by pixels rather than characters, and search engines rewrite a large share of what you write anyway.
Title & Meta Description Preview
0 characters
Title on desktop: Nothing to measure yet
Title on mobile: Nothing to measure yet
0 characters
Description on desktop: Nothing to measure yet
Description on mobile: Nothing to measure yet
Only used to draw the breadcrumb line above the title. The page is never fetched.
This is a guide, not a guarantee. Search engines rewrite title links and generate their own snippets whenever they judge that another wording matches the query better — Google documents this behaviour openly, and it happens to a large share of pages. Treat what you see here as the best version of what you control, not a preview of what will be displayed.
example.com › services › page
Your title tag will appear here
Your meta description will appear here.
Both fields fit within the usual limit at this size.
example.com › services › page
Your title tag will appear here
Your meta description will appear here.
Both fields fit within the usual limit at this size.
Your browser did not make text measurement available, so these estimates fall back to character counts. They are more conservative and less accurate than the width method.
What this does and does not do
- Estimates the rendered pixel width of a title tag and a meta description, and shows where each would be shortened.
- Shows a desktop and a mobile approximation side by side, using a font and column width close to a typical result.
- Runs entirely in your browser. It does not fetch, crawl or render your page — it only measures the text you paste in.
- Does not predict what will actually be displayed. Search engines rewrite title links and generate their own snippets to match the query.
- Does not score, grade or rank your metadata, and it does not check keywords, duplication, or whether the page matches the intent.
- Does not detect that another page on your site already uses the same title, which is a separate and more common problem.
Titles are not cut off at 60 characters. They are cut off when they run out of room, and every character is a different width.
This sounds pedantic until you look at two real titles of the same length. "Will Willow Windows Wow?" and "little lily lillian lit" are both twenty-three characters. Set in the font a search result uses, the first is roughly half again as wide as the second.
That is why a title that passed a character-count check still gets shortened, and why another title that failed one fits perfectly. The rule of thumb was never wrong on purpose. It was an approximation of the real constraint, and it is easy to measure the real constraint directly.
Read this before you rely on the preview
Search engines rewrite a large share of titles and snippets
Nothing above is a prediction of what will be shown. Google generates the title link on a result from several sources — your title tag, the H1, other visible text on the page, and the anchor text of links pointing at it — and chooses whichever it judges best for that specific query. The description is even less under your control: the snippet is very often assembled from the part of the page that matches what was searched, rather than from the meta description you wrote.
A tool that implies otherwise is selling certainty it does not have. What the preview here is genuinely good for is the thing you do control: making sure the version you wrote is a strong candidate, and that if it is used, it is not cut in the middle of the important word.
The practical consequence is a shift in where effort goes. If the H1 and the opening paragraph are also good, then every alternative available for a rewrite is a decent one. That is a more reliable investment than editing the same title tag for the fifth time.
Craft
Writing a title that survives being shortened
Assume the last third might be cut. Write so that the first two thirds still do the job on their own.
- Lead with the specific thing the page is about, not with the category it belongs to
- Put the brand name last, or leave it off entirely on pages where nobody is searching for you by name
- Use one separator style across the site and stick to it, so titles are scannable in a list of ten results
- Avoid repeating a word you have already used in the title — the second instance almost never earns its width
- Say the qualifier that matters to the searcher: a location, a price position, a timescale, a format
- Write the description as two complete sentences rather than one long one, so a cut still leaves something whole
- Include the words a person would actually type, in the order they would type them, without stacking synonyms
- Give every page a genuinely different title — near-duplicates across a template are a stronger negative signal than any length problem
What each field is for
Three fields, three completely different jobs
The title link
The only one of the three with any direct relationship to relevance. It tells a search engine and a person what the page is, in the smallest space either will accept. Written badly, it is the reason a page loses to a worse page.
The description
A conversion field, not a ranking field. Its whole job is to make the person who has already found you choose you over the two results either side. Write it like ad copy, because that is what it is.
The URL and breadcrumb
The quietest of the three and the one people read to decide whether a result is trustworthy. Short, readable, structured paths do more work here than any keyword crammed into a slug.
What audits keep finding
The metadata problems that cost the most
- Two hundred pages share one title pattern.
- A CMS template that outputs "Product Name | Category | Brand" for every item produces titles that are technically unique and functionally identical. They compete with each other, they give a search engine nothing to distinguish them by, and they are the most likely of all titles to be rewritten.
- The brand name is first on every page.
- Leading with the brand spends the most valuable third of the width on the one piece of information the searcher either already has or does not care about. On a phone, where less is visible, it can mean nothing distinguishing survives at all.
- The description was written to be exactly 155 characters.
- Padding a description to hit a target length produces a sentence that trails into nothing useful. Cutting a good description short to hit one throws away the second half of the argument. Length is a constraint to work within, not a goal.
- A redesign silently reset every title to the page name.
- This is the version of the problem that costs real money. A new CMS or theme drops the metadata field, the pages go live with a default, and traffic falls for a reason nobody connects to the launch. It is why saving the old titles before a migration is a step in its own right.
Questions
Titles, descriptions and what you actually control
How long should a title tag be?
Short enough that the part which matters is still visible after shortening. On a desktop result that is usually around 580 to 600 pixels, which lands somewhere between 50 and 65 characters depending entirely on which characters you use.
The more useful discipline is order rather than length. Put the distinguishing words first, the qualifier second, and the brand name last — then it does not greatly matter where the cut falls.
Why is Google showing a different title from the one I wrote?
Because it judged another wording to be a better match for that particular query. Google documents this openly: it generates title links from the title tag, the H1, other on-page text and anchor text pointing at the page, and it picks whichever it considers most useful for the search.
The most common triggers are a title that is stuffed with keywords, a title that is identical across many pages, a title that is half boilerplate, or a title that simply does not mention what the person searched for. Fixing those changes the odds; nothing removes the possibility.
Does the meta description affect rankings?
No. It is not a ranking factor, and it has not been one for a long time. What it affects is whether someone who has already seen your result decides to click it rather than the one above or below.
That is worth taking seriously in its own right. A page can hold the same position for a year and earn substantially more or less traffic depending on how the snippet reads.
Why does this tool measure pixels instead of characters?
Because that is what the browser does. Text is cut off when it runs out of horizontal room, and a capital W is roughly three times the width of a lower-case l. A character count treats them as equal, which is why titles that pass a character check still get shortened.
The measurement here uses the text metrics built into your own browser, with a font close to the one search results are set in. If your browser blocks that, the tool falls back to a deliberately conservative character estimate and says so.
Should I write a meta description for every page?
Write one for every page that matters commercially, and let the rest be generated. A good description on a page nobody finds is wasted effort, and a bad description on a page that ranks costs real clicks.
For very large sites, a written description for the top pages and a sensible generated pattern for the long tail is the honest trade-off. Leaving it blank on an important page is not.
If your pages rank and nobody clicks them
Position and traffic are different problems with different fixes. On a strategy call we can look at where you actually sit, what the results around you look like, and whether the gap is visibility or persuasion.
Related
Where to go next
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal