Liam Borg Avatar

The Multiple Digital Marketing Manager

Specialising in:

  • Technical SEO
  • Player Acquisition & CRO
  • Email Outreach

Education MSc Digital Marketing, University of Malta

SEO Tools

Meta Description & Title Checker

Audit page titles and meta descriptions in real time with Google SERP previews for desktop and mobile. Widths are measured in real pixels — the same way Google decides what to cut — so you see the truncation before it happens rather than guessing from a character count. Nothing you type leaves your browser.

Characters: 0
Pixels: 0
Room left: 600px
Status: Empty
Characters: 0
Pixels: 0
Room left: 920px
Status: Empty

SERP Preview

Desktop
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marketingexamples.com
https://marketingexamples.com/blog
How to Craft Compelling Meta Descriptions in 2025
Learn the frameworks top SEO teams use to write magnetic search snippets that improve CTR, dwell time, and engagement. Includes real examples to swipe.
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example.com
https://example.com
Your Page Title Will Appear Here
Your meta description will appear here. Make it compelling to improve click-through rates from search results.
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seojournal.ai
https://seojournal.ai/guides/meta-data
Meta Title vs Meta Description: Benchmarks, CTR Data & Tips
Use our updated search benchmarks to decide how long your title tag and description should be. We analysed 40k SERPs to uncover the current limits.

On-page checks

  • Enter a title and description to run the checks.

Title Limit

600px

Desktop: 600px (50-60 chars)
Mobile: 805px (50-70 chars)

Description Limit

920px

Desktop: 920px (150-160 chars)
Mobile: 680px (~120 chars)

How this measures

Real pixels

Rendered width in Arial — 18px title, 13px description — not a character estimate.

Title and meta description limits

Google cuts a snippet on rendered width, not on a character count. Two titles of exactly sixty characters can truncate differently: one full of capitals, m's and w's runs wide and gets cut, while a narrow one made of i's and l's survives. The character ranges below are what those pixel widths usually work out to, but the pixel figure is the one that decides.

Approximate truncation points in Google's results
ElementDesktopMobileTypical characters
Title tag600px805px50–60
Meta description920px680px120–160

Note that the two run in opposite directions. A phone gives a title more room than a desktop result does, and a description considerably less. If most of your traffic is mobile, write the first 120 characters of the description as though they are the whole thing, because they usually are.

How to check a title and meta description

  1. Paste the URL, title and description above. The URL is only used to render the breadcrumb line in the preview; nothing is fetched and nothing is sent anywhere.
  2. Switch between the desktop and mobile previews. A snippet that fits on one regularly fails on the other, and checking only the desktop view is the most common way a truncated description reaches production.
  3. Read the pixel width rather than the character count. The measurement renders your text in the font Google uses for results — 18px for the title, 13px for the description — and measures it, so it accounts for the width of the actual letters you typed.
  4. Work through the on-page checks. They cover the things that are easy to get wrong and invisible once the page is live: a missing focus keyword, a description that repeats the title, a title that leads with the brand rather than the subject.

Why a pixel measurement and not a character count

Most title checkers count characters and colour the counter red past some threshold. That is a reasonable approximation and it is wrong often enough to matter. "WWW Marketing Management Workshop" and "illicit initialisation limits" are both 29 characters; rendered, the first is close to twice the width of the second. A character counter passes both or fails both. A pixel measurement tells you which one Google will actually cut.

The same reasoning applies to the mobile preview. Truncation there is not a scaled-down version of the desktop rule — it is a different width entirely, which is why the two previews here are separate rather than one view with a slider.

What this tool does not do

It does not crawl your site. Paste in what you have written, or what a page currently returns, and it measures that. If you want to pull existing titles and descriptions from a live site in bulk, that is a crawler's job — Screaming Frog and Sitebulb both export them, and both report pixel widths too. This is for the writing stage, before anything is published, and for the quick check on a single page when you are deciding whether a rewrite is worth deploying.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a title tag be?
Google truncates on rendered width, not character count, so the honest answer is a pixel one: roughly 600px on desktop and 805px on mobile. That works out at about 50-60 characters for most copy, but a title full of wide characters (capitals, m's and w's) gets cut sooner than one full of narrow ones. This tool measures the actual rendered width rather than estimating from character count, so it tells you which side of the line you are on.
How long should a meta description be?
About 920px on desktop, which is roughly 150-160 characters, and closer to 680px (around 120 characters) on mobile. Write the first 120 characters as though they are all anyone will read, because on a phone that is often true.
Does the meta description affect rankings?
Not directly — Google has said for years that it is not a ranking factor. It affects click-through rate, and a snippet that wins more clicks than the results around it is worth writing carefully. Treat it as ad copy for a listing you do not pay for.
Why does Google show a different description to the one I wrote?
Google rewrites descriptions on the majority of queries, usually pulling a passage from the page that matches the search more closely than your description does. A well-written description still sets the default, and it is what gets used when someone searches for your brand or the exact topic of the page. If Google consistently ignores yours, that is a signal the page body answers the query better than your snippet does.
Is this the same as a meta description tester or a title tag checker?
Yes — those are all names for the same job, and people search for all of them. Whether you call it a checker, a tester, a length checker or a SERP preview tool, what you want to know is whether Google will cut your title or description off, and where. This measures the rendered width of both and shows you the result in a desktop and a mobile preview.
People arrive here searching for Moz's title tag tool. Is this a replacement?
It does the same core job — type a title and a description, see how they render as a search result, find out whether they will be truncated. What is measured here is rendered pixel width in Google's own result fonts rather than a character estimate, and everything runs in your browser rather than on a server. Whether that is a like-for-like replacement depends on what you were using theirs for; if you want the rest of a full SEO suite, this is one page, not that.
Why do the desktop and mobile limits go in opposite directions?
Because they are set by different layouts rather than by one rule that scales. A phone result gives the title more room than a desktop one does — about 805px against 600px — while the description gets considerably less, roughly 680px against 920px. So a title that fits everywhere can sit alongside a description that only survives on desktop. It is worth checking both previews rather than assuming one predicts the other.
Is the content I paste sent anywhere?
No. The measurement and preview run in JavaScript in your own browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored on a server, or logged. Your last inputs are kept in your browser's local storage so the page is still filled in when you come back, and the Clear button wipes that.