Title Tag & Meta Description Checker

There are two ways in. Type or paste a title and a meta description, and the checker measures them as you type. Or enter a URL: it fetches the live page, reads its title and description and fills them in, so everything on the page then describes what the site actually serves.

Measuring happens in your browser. The checker draws the text on an invisible canvas in Arial, at 20 pixels for the title and 14 pixels for the description, the usual approximation of how Google sets desktop results, and reads the width. Runs of spaces and line breaks are collapsed first, as they would be in a result. For the split second before the canvas is ready, it uses a rough stand-in of 10 pixels per title character and 7 per description character, and the meter says “measuring…”.

It compares those widths with three estimates, draws a desktop and a mobile preview, and lists warnings. An optional focus keyword adds one more check: that the keyword is in the title, and in the part that stays visible.

What it cannot do is tell you what Google will display. Google may rewrite either field, and the results layout changes over time. The checker answers a narrower question you can act on: if Google uses your text as written, where is it likely to be cut?

Google does not cut results after a set number of characters. Its documentation for title links and for snippets says the text is truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width. Width depends on the letters: in Arial a capital W is more than four times as wide as a lowercase i, and capitals as a group are much wider than lowercase.

That is why a character limit misleads. The titles below were measured in Arial at 20 pixels, the way the checker measures them, and compared with the default 600-pixel desktop estimate. Widths are rounded, and your browser may differ by a pixel or two.

The same 57 characters are about 138 pixels wider in capitals. A 64-character title fits while a 52-character one does not. A plain 60-character rule would have judged three of these four wrongly.

Google does not publish these widths. The defaults are estimates in common use by SEO tools, and the page labels them as such. Open “Width limits used” under the preview to see or change them.

Change a limit if you trust a different number, such as your own measurements of current results for your queries. While you type, a value under 100 is ignored and the default applies; values over 3,000 are capped. The meters, warnings and previews update at once.

There is no mobile title limit. Google publishes no mobile width and says only that title links are cut to fit the device, so the mobile preview wraps the title instead of measuring it, as a rough picture.

Under the title and description fields, a bar fills as the text gets wider, and a line reads, for example, “57 characters · 554 px of ~600 px”. The bar is green below 90% of the limit, amber from 90% to 100%, and red beyond it, when the line adds “(likely cut off)”. The description meter measures against the desktop limit; the mobile cut shows up in the warnings and the mobile preview.

Amber is the zone to watch rather than fix. A title at 560 pixels fits today, but one extra word can push it over.

Measure what the page will really output. If your SEO plugin adds a separator and the site name through a template, paste the title with them, because that is the text Google sees. In Yoast SEO and Rank Math the snippet preview in the editor shows the assembled title you can copy.

Warnings come in three levels: an error for a missing title, warnings for text that is likely cut or likely to be replaced, and information notes that are worth a look but not a fix.

With none of these, the panel says “No problems found. Both fit within the width estimates.” That means both fit. It says nothing about whether the words will make anyone click.

One quirk of the keyword check: it looks for the keyword anywhere in the title text, so a short keyword can match inside a longer word, and “seo” is found in “Seoul”. Use a phrase of two or three words for a meaningful check.

The desktop preview is drawn 624 pixels wide in Arial: a URL line, then the title at 20 pixels and the description at 14 pixels. The URL line imitates Google’s breadcrumb style: the host name without “www”, then up to three path segments separated by “›”. A post at example.com/blog/fix-running-toilet/ shows as example.com › blog › fix-running-toilet.

When the title is too wide, the preview cuts it the way results do. It fits as much text as it can while leaving room for a space and an ellipsis, then backs up to the last whole word unless that would throw away more than 40% of what fits. So a cut title ends on a whole word followed by “…”. Read that version aloud: does it still say what the page is?

The mobile preview is narrower. It sets the title at 18 pixels and wraps it onto at most two lines rather than cutting it by width, and cuts the description at the 680-pixel mobile estimate.

Real results carry more than the preview shows. A site name and favicon sit above the title, a date can open the snippet and take some of its room, and rich results such as review stars, prices or sitelinks change the layout. The preview leaves those out on purpose: it shows how your own text fits, which is the part you control.

Enter a URL and the checker fetches the page from RankHive’s server, following up to four redirects, and reads the HTML the server returns. It does not run JavaScript, so a title that a script sets after the page loads will not show here. Pages larger than about 900 KB are refused, and each request gives up after 9 seconds.

Notes then flag what matters more than length: an HTTP status of 400 or above, more than one meta description tag, a noindex, and more than one canonical URL. A noindexed page will not appear in Google whatever its title says, and a canonical pointing elsewhere means Google is likely to show the other URL.

URL checks are limited to 60 an hour and 200 a day from one IP address. Typing into the fields has no limit, since the text never leaves your browser.

An illustrative run on a plumbing company’s how-to post. The site and findings are made up; the widths are measured the way the checker measures them.

The two description tags came from the theme printing the excerpt and Yoast SEO printing its own. The checker shows the first one in the page source, but you cannot know which one Google will use, so remove one: here, by turning off the theme’s option. The two H1s came from the theme printing the post title as a heading while the post body started with a Heading block set to H1. Changing that block to H2 leaves one clear main title.

After the changes and a cache clear, a second check of the URL shows one description tag, one H1, the new title and no warnings.

Most surprises in URL mode come from the layer between your editor and the page: templates, themes, caches and other plugins.

Treat the limits as a gradient, not a cliff. A title a few pixels past 600 is borderline: Google’s layout shifts, and the estimate is a rounded convention. What matters is what gets cut. If the only casualty is your brand at the end, the title is fine as it is.

Information notes are prompts. A 25-character title on a contact page and a 60-character description on a login page need no work. The keyword warning can be ignored when the title uses a natural variant that people also search, since Google understands close variants.

And none of it matters for pages you keep out of search on purpose, or pages already earning their clicks. Search the main query and look at the real result before you change a title or description that works.