SERP snippet preview and title length checker

How long should a title tag and meta description be?

Google sets no maximum for either. Its documentation says there's no limit on how long a <title> element or a meta description can be, and that both are truncated in results as needed, typically to fit the device width. Because the cut depends on width, letters matter more than the count: a title of capital Ws is more than four times as wide as one of lowercase ls.

This preview measures the title the way our own SEO audit does: each character's advance width in Arial at 20 px (0.556 em for a, 0.944 em for W, 0.556 em for anything outside the table), added up and rounded. Our budget is about 600 px. That is a working figure for our pages, not a published Google limit.

For descriptions our house rule is 120 to 160 characters; it is our rule, not Google's. Google says snippets are primarily created from the page content and that it sometimes uses the meta description when that describes the page more accurately, so a description is a suggestion, not a guarantee.

Google may also replace a title it finds half-empty, out of date, inaccurate or full of boilerplate. Its documentation lists the text it can use instead: the main visual title, h1 headings, og:title, anchor text on the page and the text of links pointing to it.

title width = round(Σ advance width in em × 20 px)
budgets (ours): title ≤ 600 px · description 120–160 characters