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pixel width, not character count · desktop and mobile · tags generated alongside

Google truncates titles on pixel width, not character count — so a title full of capitals and Ws is cut off long before one made of narrow letters. This measures the actual rendered width in the fonts Google uses, shows where the cut falls on desktop and mobile, and generates the matching tags.

How to use

1. Type your title and description. The preview and the measurements update as you type.
2. Add the URL — the breadcrumb line is built from it the way Google does, using the hostname and the path segments as words.
3. Switch Device. Mobile is narrower per line but shows more description lines, so a description that is cut off on desktop can fit on mobile and vice versa.
4. Read the Measurements table: rendered pixel width against the available budget, and whether truncation happened.
5. Copy the tags. Title, description, canonical and the matching Open Graph tags are generated together so they cannot drift apart.

Why pixels and not characters

"Keep your title under 60 characters" is a rule of thumb standing in for the real constraint, which is the width of the container. Google renders desktop titles in Arial at 20px inside roughly 600 pixels; 60 characters is what fits when the characters are average. In practice, Willingham Wildlife Wonders: Winter Walks is 41 characters and wider than Ten things I learned illustrating tiny little icons at 51. Capitals, W, M and @ are wide; i, l, t and . are narrow.

The measurement here uses a canvas to render your text in Arial at the size Google uses and compares the result to the container budget. It will not be exact to the pixel — Google's exact fonts, container widths and layout change without notice, and vary by result type, query and locale — but it is a far better signal than a character count, and it tells you which words are at risk.

What actually gets shown

Google rewrites titles often — studies put it around 60% of results. It draws from your <title>, your H1, anchor text pointing at the page, and the site name. The most common triggers for a rewrite are a title that is too long, one stuffed with keywords or separators, or one that does not describe the page. Keeping it accurate and inside the budget is how you keep control of it.

Meta descriptions are rewritten more often still — Google generates its own snippet from page content for the majority of queries, because the best snippet depends on what was searched for and your static description cannot. Write one anyway: it is used when it matches the query well, and it is what Slack, X, LinkedIn and every other unfurl falls back on when there is no og:description. The social card renderer shows that side.

The URL line is not the URL. Google shows a breadcrumb built from the site name and path — which is why readable, word-based paths matter more than they look, and why /p?id=48213 produces a worse-looking result than /blog/url-encoding-explained. If you have BreadcrumbList markup, Google uses it instead; the breadcrumb generator produces it.

The date prefix appears for content Google judges to be time-sensitive. It eats into the description budget, which is why the field is here — it is a real 10–14 characters you do not control.

FAQ

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