Google cuts titles and descriptions by width in pixels, not by number of characters. A title of 60 narrow letters can fit while 50 wide ones do not: “W” is more than three times as wide as “i”. This checker measures your text in the font Google uses on desktop and shows where it would be cut.
The limits it uses
| Font | Shown on desktop | Rough character guide | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Title | Arial 20 px | about 600 px | 50 to 60 characters |
| Meta description | Arial 14 px | about 920 px (two lines) | 120 to 155 characters |
On phones the description can run to more lines, so the desktop limit is the tighter one. Treat all of these as guides: Google changes its layout from time to time.
How to write a title that fits
- Put the main words first. If the end is cut, the part people searched for is still visible.
- Keep the brand short, at the end, and use one separator consistently, such as “ | ” or “ – ”.
- Make every page's title different. Duplicated titles make pages compete and Google is more likely to rewrite them.
- Do not stuff keywords. Google often replaces titles that read like keyword lists.
How to write a description that earns the click
- Say what the page offers and why it is the right result, in the first 120 characters.
- Include the detail people compare on: price, scope, format, location.
- Give each page its own description. Of the 24 sites SignalCrawler audited in September and October 2026, 11 had duplicate descriptions and 14 had descriptions too short to be useful.
Google may still rewrite them
Google rewrites titles and descriptions when it thinks another text describes the page better for a given search, for example the H1 or a passage from the page. You lower the chance by keeping the title close to the H1, the description specific, and both free of boilerplate. Changes to titles can move rankings either way, so change a group of pages first and compare clicks in Search Console.
Check every page at once
This tool checks one title at a time. A SignalCrawler audit measures the title and description of every crawled page, flags missing, duplicate, too short and too wide ones, and groups them by page template, so you can fix the template instead of each page.