Meta Tag Analyzer
Analyze meta titles, descriptions, and see how your page appears in Google.
Meta Tag Analyzer for title and description length
Paste your title tags and meta descriptions and get a character count, an estimated pixel width, and a plain truncation flag — not just a 60/155 pass-fail. We separately validate the required Open Graph and Twitter Card fields against what the specs actually require, not what every other analyzer assumes. Free, no signup, no invented limits.
Built and reviewed by Sayed Hasan, founder of SEOs Hut · Updated 28 September 2026 · Free, no signup
How long should a meta tag description be?
Google says there's no character limit for a meta description — it's truncated as needed to fit device width, which varies by device rather than a fixed number. The same is true of title tags. In practice, a study of over 81,000 titles found 50–60 characters (580–600 pixels) the safest desktop range, and 70–80 on mobile, though Google still rewrites titles anyway in roughly 40% of cases even inside that range.
If you're staring at a spreadsheet of titles wondering which ones are "safe", start with Google's own sentence, not the 60-character rule every checker enforces.
“There's no limit on how long a <title> element can be, but the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.”
<b>Google Search Central, Title Links documentation</b> — developers.google.com
Google's meta description documentation says almost the same thing, word for word in structure: no limit, truncated as needed, typically to fit device width. Neither page gives you 60 or 155 as a number, because neither number is a rule — they're averages from measuring what actually survives on screen. The rest of this page gives you those measured averages, in characters and in pixels, because a character count on its own will still let you down.
Documented limit vs. what actually displays
Google documents no hard character limit for any of these. The columns below are measured display thresholds — from a study of over 81,000 title tags and Google's own field documentation — not rules enforced by any spec.
Why a 58-character title still got the ellipsis
Character count is a proxy. Google renders your title in pixels, and pixels are decided by the letters you chose, not by a number in a spreadsheet.
Two titles of 55 characters can occupy very different widths. A title set in capitals, or one full of wide characters like M and W, burns through the roughly 580–600 pixel desktop budget faster than the same length in lowercase. That's the actual mechanism behind "my title looks fine in the editor but got cut off in the SERP" — the editor counts characters, Google renders pixels. If you're auditing this across a whole site rather than one spreadsheet, the full SEO audit checks title and description length alongside everything else that gates a page's visibility.
The practical fix is the same either way: write to the range Zyppy's study measured as the sweet spot (50–60 characters desktop, 70–80 mobile), and give a title heavy on capitals or wide letters a few characters of headroom below that. There's a second variable you can't fully control: Google rewrites titles anyway, even inside the "safe" band, in roughly 40% of cases at 51–55 characters. Titles under 5 characters or over 70 are rewritten nearly every time. A perfect length reduces the odds of truncation — it doesn't guarantee Google keeps your exact wording. Once you've rewritten a batch, check whether it actually moved anything; length compliance and ranking movement are two different questions.
What each surface actually reads
Nine different signals feed Google's title link, not just your <title> tag. This is the part most analyzers skip — they check that a tag is present and stop there.
Google's title-link algorithm treats this as one signal among nine — alongside H1s, prominent styled text, anchor text and og:title — not an automatic guarantee of what's shown.
Written badly, Google often replaces it with page text; written well, it's the snippet most searchers actually read before clicking.
Tells Google which URL is the master copy. A wrong canonical silently redirects your title and description signals to a different page entirely.
Controls indexing and, alongside max-snippet, nosnippet and the data-nosnippet attribute, snippet length too.
Facebook and other platforms use this for link previews. Google can also fold it into its nine title-link sources, so keep it aligned with <title> rather than treating them as separate creative opportunities.
Listed under Optional Metadata in the Open Graph protocol. If it's missing, Facebook falls back to page text. That's a choice, not a broken page.
Facebook wants 1200×630px (1.91:1) and won't accept below 600×315px for a large-image post. Its crawler only accepts gzip or deflate encoding.
The fourth required OG property, alongside og:title, og:image and og:url.
Google announced it does not use this tag, and its documentation still carries that note today. Leaving it in costs nothing and tells Google nothing.
Twitter Card tags (twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:image) sit alongside these and are validated the same way — present, non-empty, and consistent with the OG equivalents rather than contradicting them.
"og:description is a required tag" — it isn't
The Open Graph protocol defines exactly four required properties: og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url. og:description sits under Optional Metadata in the spec itself. Most analyzers — including plenty of paid ones — flag a missing og:description as an error anyway. It's a recommendation dressed up as a rule. Miss it and Facebook falls back to your page's visible text, which is a worse outcome, not a broken one. Whether the text underneath a good title would actually get quoted by an AI answer engine is a separate question again — that's what the AEO readiness checker tests.
78 characters vs. 54 — what Google actually shows
What the largest study of this actually measured
Four mistakes a character counter won't catch
Treating 60/155 as a pass/fail line
What happens: A title at exactly 60 characters gets marked "good" by tools using a hard cutoff, even though it may already be past the 580–600px desktop budget if it's set in capitals or uses wide letters.
Do this instead: Check the pixel estimate alongside the character count, and treat the character range as guidance, not a spec.
Writing og:title and <title> as two different sentences
What happens: Because og:title only shows on social shares, it gets written as a separate, punchier line — then Google quietly folds it in as one of its nine title-link sources and the SERP and the Facebook card say different things.
Do this instead: Write one title that works in both places, or accept that Google may show either one.
Panicking over a red "og:description missing" flag
What happens: Treating an optional property as a broken page, when the Open Graph spec itself lists only four required fields.
Do this instead: Fix the four required OG properties first, then decide if og:description adds anything a social platform's fallback wouldn't.
Leaving old keyword tags because "it can't hurt"
What happens: Google has documented since September 2009 that it does not use the keywords meta tag, so it isn't scored, isn't a ranking factor, and isn't read for anything on the Google side.
Do this instead: Remove it or ignore it — just don't spend time optimising it.
Three ways to control snippet length directly
Writing a good description doesn't force Google to use it. These are the only documented controls over whether a snippet shows at all.
| Directive | What it does | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
max-snippet:[number] | Caps the snippet to a maximum number of characters. | Robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header |
nosnippet | Blocks any text snippet, image preview or video snippet for the page. | Robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header |
data-nosnippet | Marks specific HTML elements as off-limits for snippets, without hiding the rest of the page's text. | An HTML attribute on the element itself |
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
Everything else on this page is about writing content Google chooses to keep, not forcing an outcome. And if a schema description tells a different story from your meta description, check what your structured data is actually claiming — the two should agree.
What to actually do with this
Paste your titles and descriptions, fix anything flagged for pixel width rather than raw character count, confirm the four required OG properties are present, and stop treating og:description and the keywords tag as problems. Then check whether the rewrite happened — search your exact title in an incognito window, or wait for Search Console to show what Google actually kept. A title earns the click; what's underneath it has to earn the read, which is worth checking once the wording is fixed. And a perfect title on a page Google hasn't indexed changes nothing — confirm the page is indexed before you spend more time on wording.
Meta Tag Analyzer FAQ
How long should a meta tag description be?
What is the recommended length for meta descriptions in 2026?
What happens if page title is over 60 characters?
How many characters should title tags be so they aren't cut off?
How to check if meta tags are working?
Do meta tags still work?
Primary sources used on this page
- Google Search Central — Title Links: no character limit, truncated to fit device width — developers.google.com
- Google Search Central — Snippets: no character limit for meta descriptions, plus max-snippet/nosnippet controls — developers.google.com
- Zyppy — meta title tag length study of 81,000+ titles, updated 1 July 2026 — zyppy.com
- The Open Graph protocol — the four required properties and Optional Metadata — ogp.me
- Facebook for Developers — og:image sizing and encoding requirements — developers.facebook.com
- Google Search Central Blog — Google does not use the keywords meta tag (2009) — developers.google.com
Once your titles and descriptions are fixed
A good title earns a click. These check whether the page underneath deserves it, and whether Google — or an AI engine — will actually show it.
Read the guide: SEO-Friendly URLs: Best Practices and Examples and URL Length and SEO: Does URL Length Affect Rankings?. Want it handled for you? See our website audit service.