SERP Snippet Preview

Why character counts are the wrong unit

Almost every title checker tells you to stay under 60 characters. It’s a useful rule of thumb and it’s wrong about half the time, because browsers lay out text by width and not by count.

WWWWWWWWWW and iiiiiiiiii are both ten characters. Rendered in the font Google uses, the first is more than twice as wide as the second. A title in title case with a couple of capitalised brand words runs out of room well before 60 characters; a lowercase title full of narrow letters can run past it and still fit comfortably.

So this tool measures the rendered width of your text and compares it to the width of the result column. The preview above is real text in a real fixed-width box, truncated by the browser rather than by a formula, which is as close as you can get without querying Google itself.

Where Google actually cuts

Nowhere in Google’s documentation is there a published pixel or character limit, and any tool that quotes one to three significant figures is quoting somebody’s measurement, not a specification. What is documented is more useful anyway: Google says snippets are “automatically created from page content”, and that it uses your meta description when that gives users a more accurate description of the page than text pulled from the page itself.

Titles work the same way. Google’s guide to influencing your title links says it “uses a number of different sources to automatically determine the title link”, of which your <title> element is one. You are writing a strong suggestion, not a specification.

Which is the right way to read this preview. If your title fits, you have removed one reason for Google to rewrite it. If it overflows, you have found out before your readers did.

What to do when it overflows

• Move the important words left. Whatever gets cut is the tail, so the promise has to be at the front. This matters more than getting under any particular width.
• Cut the brand suffix on long titles.“ | Your Company Name” is often a third of the column, and Google already shows your site name on its own line above the title.
• Watch the capitals. Title Case Costs Real Width. Sentence case buys you a few characters at no cost to clarity.
• Write the description as a standalone pitch.It isn’t a ranking factor — it decides whether someone clicks the position you already earned, which is a different and more immediate payoff.

One page at a time is the limit here

This tool is deliberately a single-page check: paste, look, fix, move on. It has no idea whether the other pages on your site have titles at all, whether forty of them share the same description, or whether the one you just fixed is being outranked by another of your own URLs.

Those are site-wide questions, and they need a crawl. Reachavo’s Site Audit reports missing, duplicate and over-long titles and descriptions across every page it finds, and Organic Keywords shows which of those pages are earning anything in the first place — worth knowing before you spend an afternoon rewriting snippets nobody sees.

If you’re rewriting titles as part of a content plan rather than a cleanup, the keyword gap guide covers the step before this one: working out which pages are worth writing at all.