SERP snippet preview & meta length checker

How Google decides what fits

Google does not cut titles at 60 characters. It cuts them when they run out of horizontal space. On desktop the title is set in Arial at about 20px in a column roughly 600px wide, and anything that overflows becomes an ellipsis. Descriptions are 14px Arial and are trimmed at around 920px, which works out at about two lines. That is why the old character rules are unreliable: a title in capitals or full of wide letters is cut far sooner than one in narrow lowercase.

Google does not publish these numbers, and they move whenever it changes its layout. The limits in this tool are the widely observed approximations for current results:

A worked example

Take two titles with exactly the same 47 characters. "Brand identity design for startups in Leeds, UK" measures about 412px at 20px Arial, leaving plenty of room. The same words in capitals measure about 545px, a third wider, and are close to being cut. Meanwhile a 64-character title in mixed case, "Website Design Pricing: What a Small Business Site Costs in 2026", still fits at about 591px. A character counter would pass the capitals and fail the longer title; the pixel meter gets both right.

Writing a title that earns the click

• Front-load the main phrase.If the end is cut, the important words are already on screen. "Brand identity design for startups" beats "Startups: we can help with your brand identity design".
• Promise something specific.A number, a timeframe or an outcome ("in three weeks", "from $700", "free template") stands out among ten similar results.
• One separator, brand last. Google already shows your site name above the title, so the brand at the end of the title is optional. Drop it first when you run out of room.
• Unique for every page. Duplicate titles across a site are one of the most common triggers for Google writing its own.

Writing the description

The meta description does not affect rankings, but it is your ad copy. Treat it as one or two sentences that answer "why this result?": what the page gives the reader, and a reason to choose it. Include the phrase people search for, because Google bolds words that match the query, which draws the eye down the page. If your page shows a date, as articles often do, the date and its dash come out of the same pixel budget.

Google often replaces descriptions with a passage from the page when it matches the query better. You cannot prevent that, but a specific, accurate description is used far more often than a generic one. Missing and very short descriptions are almost always replaced.

Common snippet mistakes

• Keyword stuffing."Web Design | Web Designer | Web Design Agency" reads as spam and is likely to be rewritten.
• All capitals. Capitals are wider, so they are cut sooner, and they look like shouting.
• The same text for title and description. You get two chances to make the case. Use both.
• Optimising only for desktop. Most searches happen on phones, where the description is shorter. Check both views before you publish.

Beyond the blue link

The snippet is one part of how your page appears. Structured data from the schema markup generator can add breadcrumbs, product prices and ratings, and a good social preview from the Open Graph generator makes the same page look right when it is shared. For the bigger picture, see my notes on SEO and conversion rate. And if you would rather have the technical SEO done properly from day one, it comes with every website I build.