Meta Title & Description Length Checker

Titles get cut off in search results, and the cut is not measured in characters. Google truncates on available width in pixels, so a title full of capital letters and Ms is clipped shorter than one full of lowercase Ls and Is at the same character count. The 60-character convention is a shorthand that happens to work for most sentence-case English titles.

This checker counts your title against that 60-character convention and your meta description against the corresponding 160, reporting the count, the limit, the remaining allowance, and a plain OK or Too long verdict. Toggle between the two fields with the buttons at the top.

It is a fast gate rather than a full diagnosis. Where a character count is a poor proxy, and what to do about it, is the substance of this page.

What Google actually has is a container of fixed width, into which it renders your title in its own font at its own size. When the rendered text exceeds the container it is truncated and an ellipsis appended. Because letterforms have different widths, the number of characters that fit varies - a title of narrow characters can run several beyond 60 intact, while one dominated by wide capitals can clip before it.

Sixty is the number that emerged as a safe approximation for typical mixed-case prose, and it is genuinely useful for that. It becomes unsafe in two directions. Titles in all capitals, titles heavy in Ms and Ws, and titles containing wide symbols will clip early. Titles in lowercase with lots of narrow letters will survive past the count, so trimming them to 60 costs you words you could have kept.

The practical response is to treat 60 as a working limit and to reach for a pixel-based check when the title matters and looks unusual. If you are within 55 characters you are almost certainly safe whatever the letterforms; between 55 and 65 the outcome depends on the specific characters; beyond 65 you should expect truncation regardless.

The 160-character description limit works the same way and matters less. Google rewrites descriptions frequently - often assembling a snippet from page content that better matches the specific query - so an over-long description is less likely to be truncated than to be discarded entirely in favour of something Google composed itself.

That does not make it worthless. When your description is used, it is doing the work of a small advertisement, and it is the one piece of copy on the result you fully control. The useful discipline is front-loading: put the reason to click in the first 120 characters, so the description survives both truncation and the narrower rendering on mobile.

One thing the checker deliberately does not do is compare your two fields against each other. A common and avoidable failure is a title and description that repeat the same phrase, which spends the description’s entire budget restating what the reader has already read one line above. Check the pair by eye after each passes its own count.

The count is the raw string length of the field in UTF-16 code units, recomputed on every keystroke. The limit is 60 when the title mode is active and 160 when the description mode is, and remaining is that limit minus the count, floored at zero so it never displays a negative - which means once you are over the limit the remaining tile stops being informative and the status tile carries the signal instead.

Status is a three-state string: an em dash when the field is empty, OK when the count is at or below the limit, and Too long when it is above. There is no warning band between the two, so a title at exactly 60 reports OK with no indication that it is sitting on the boundary.

Both limits are static conventions held in the tool, not values fetched from Google or derived from a rendering measurement. No pixel width is computed, no font is applied, and no account is taken of casing or character mix - which is precisely the gap between what this measures and what determines truncation. Everything runs locally with no network request.