Meta title and description length checker
Every tool for this counts characters and tells you to stay under 155 or 160. Google has never published either number.
What its documentation says is that there is no limit, and that a snippet is truncated to fit the device WIDTH. So this measures width, at a named font and size, and shows you what it assumed.
It runs entirely in your browser. Measuring text needs no network, so nothing you paste is sent to us, stored, or logged.
55 characters
150 characters
Title, desktop
20px Arial, sans-serif
Not measured. This needs a browser canvas, and without one no width is reported rather than a zero being shown as a pass.
Title, mobile
18px Arial, sans-serif
Not measured. This needs a browser canvas, and without one no width is reported rather than a zero being shown as a pass.
Description, desktop
14px Arial, sans-serif
Not measured. This needs a browser canvas, and without one no width is reported rather than a zero being shown as a pass.
Description, mobile
14px Arial, sans-serif
Not measured. This needs a browser canvas, and without one no width is reported rather than a zero being shown as a pass.
Where 155 came from, and not from Google
There’s no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.
The strings “155 characters”, “160 characters” and “recommended length” do not appear anywhere on that page. That is checkable and it was checked, against the fetched bytes, on the day this was written.
A character count is a proxy for width, and it fails in the direction people care about. Ten capital Ms and ten lower-case i’s are the same count and nearly three times apart on screen. The measurement above the fold shows both, with the same ruler.
The other half of Google’s page is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on this: it often writes its own description from the page when that suits the query better, and then the one you wrote is not shown at all.
What this does not check
Having just argued that the field publishes a number Google never gave, this page owes you the limits of its own.
- Whether Google will use your description at all. It often writes its own from the page when that matches the query better, and no tool can tell you in advance which it will do.
- The exact pixel at which your snippet is cut. Google publishes no number and changes the layout without notice, so the widths here are community estimates and are shown as estimates.
- How your text renders in a font Google has not told anybody about. The measurement uses a named font at a named size, printed beside each result so you can see what was assumed.
- Whether a shorter description is a better one. This measures width. Whether the words earn the click is a different question and not one a counter can answer.