SERP preview tool
Rendered in your browser · nothing is uploaded
Draws your title and description as a Google result, twice: once at desktop proportions and once at mobile. The cut is applied at 60 and 155 characters on the desktop card and 50 and 120 on the mobile one, backing up to the last word so the trim reads the way a real snippet does.
How to use the serp preview tool
This page fetches nothing, asks Google nothing and knows nothing about your page. It renders four numbers as a picture, and being clear about which four is the whole of its usefulness. Those numbers are observations of where a typical result runs out of room, not published limits, because Google publishes no character limit at all: its documentation says "there’s no limit on how long a <title> element can be" and that the title link "is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width". The same page for snippets says the identical thing about meta descriptions. Width is the real constraint, so a title in wide capitals is cut earlier than the counter suggests and a title full of narrow letters survives past it. Leave a few characters of margin and treat the counter as a warning light rather than a ruler.
The mobile card is the one to write against, and it truncates earlier: about 50 characters of title against 60, and 120 of description against 155. Most searches happen on a phone, so writing to the desktop limit means being cut on the majority of impressions. Front-load accordingly. Whatever distinguishes this page from the nine results around it should appear in the first forty characters, not after a category name and a separator.
Google frequently replaces the title anyway, and the scale is larger than most people expect. Zyppy analysed 80,959 title tags across 2,370 sites in the first quarter of 2022 and found Google rewriting 61.6% of them. The same study found the rewrite rate lowest, between 39% and 42%, for titles of 51 to 60 characters, and rising away from that band in both directions: titles of 20 characters or fewer were rewritten more than half the time, titles of 1 to 5 characters 96.6% of the time, and anything of 70 characters or more 99.9% of the time. Google’s own documentation explains what it substitutes from: the main visual title on the page, heading elements, og:title, prominent styled text, page content, the anchor text of links pointing at the page, and WebSite structured data. Making the <title>, the <h1> and the visible headline say roughly the same thing is the practical way to keep the rewrite from surprising you, because whichever Google picks then reads the same.
The meta description is a suggestion in a stronger sense still. Google states that snippets "are primarily created from the page content itself" and that it "sometimes uses the meta description" where that would describe the page more accurately for a given query. So the snippet is query-dependent: one page can show three different descriptions to three different searches, and none of them need be the one you wrote. Writing a good description is still worth the ten minutes, because it is what gets used on brand and navigational queries where the wording matters most, but agonising over the last five characters is not.
The URL line on the card is decorative here. Google shows a breadcrumb path derived from the site structure or from BreadcrumbList markup rather than the raw URL, so a deep path in the box will not appear as typed. What the URL genuinely affects is the readability of the slug in the trail, which is a good reason to keep it short and free of parameters.
A note on how the cut is drawn here, since it differs slightly from a naive substring. The text is cut at the limit and then backed up to the previous space, unless that space falls in the first sixty per cent of the string, in which case the cut stands mid-word. An ellipsis is appended either way. Real snippets behave much the same, so a description whose first sentence stands alone survives the trim better than one that runs on.
What people use it for
- Checking whether a title survives the 60-character cut
- Writing a meta description that still reads as a sentence when trimmed
- Comparing how one result looks on mobile against desktop
- Front-loading a title so the distinguishing words land before the mobile cut
- Deciding whether the brand name earns its place at the end of a title
- Making the title tag and the visible headline agree before Google picks between them
Questions
About 60 characters for desktop and 50 for mobile, as a working guide. Google publishes no limit and truncates to fit the device width, so leave a few characters of margin.
No. Google states there is no limit on the length of a title element or a meta description, and that both are truncated in results to fit the width of the device.
Because capitals are wider. The cut is by rendered pixels, so the same character count can survive in one typeface and be trimmed in another.
The mobile one. It cuts at roughly 50 characters against 60 and it represents most searches, so a title that only fits the desktop card is being trimmed on the majority of impressions.
Around 155 characters on desktop and 120 on mobile as a guide, which is the same working figure the character and word counters measure against. Google publishes no limit, cuts by rendered width, and frequently generates its own description from the page instead.
It replaces titles it judges unhelpful. Zyppy found 61.6% of 80,959 titles rewritten across 2,370 sites in early 2022, most commonly for length, boilerplate or repetition.
In that study, 51 to 60 characters, at 39% to 42%. Both extremes are rewritten heavily: a title of 20 characters or fewer more than half the time and one of 1 to 5 characters 96.6%, against 99.9% at 70 characters and above. Long is worse than short, and the middle of that band is the safe place to be.
Google names the main visual title, heading elements, og:title, prominent styled text, page content, anchor text in links to the page, and WebSite structured data as sources.
You cannot force the title element to be used, but you can make the alternatives agree with it. If the title tag, the h1 and the visible headline all say the same thing, whichever one Google picks reads the same.
No. It says snippets are primarily built from page content and that it sometimes uses the meta description where that describes the page better for the query. Brand and navigational searches are where yours is most likely to appear.
Because the snippet is generated per query. Google picks the passage that best answers the search, so one page legitimately shows several different descriptions.
Not directly. It affects click-through rate on the searches where it is used, which is reason enough to write one and not reason to rewrite it monthly.
At the end, and only if the distinguishing words fit first. Google adds and strips brand names on its own, so spending forty per cent of a mobile title on yours is expensive.
No, and it cannot be. This page cuts by character count as an approximation of a cut that happens by rendered width, so treat both counters as guides with a margin rather than as hard stops.
It slices at the limit, then backs up to the last space unless that space falls in the first sixty per cent of the text, and appends an ellipsis. Real snippets break on words in much the same way.
No. Nothing is requested and nothing is uploaded. It renders exactly what you type against the limits shown.
Not usually. Google shows a breadcrumb trail built from the site structure or BreadcrumbList markup rather than the raw path, so treat that line as decoration and keep the slug short for readability.
Google adds it for pages it judges time-sensitive, from the page and its markup rather than from anything you can set here. It also eats into the space available for the description.
Considerably, and this card shows neither. A result with sitelinks, a rating or an FAQ block occupies far more space and reads differently, but it starts from the same title and snippet.
Yes. Duplicated or templated titles across a site are among the most common triggers for a rewrite, and they give a searcher no way to tell two of your results apart.
Different property entirely. Open Graph and X card tags govern that, and they are frequently worth writing separately since the audience and the surrounding context are not the same.
No. A truncated title is a click-through problem rather than a ranking one, so aim for a title that still reads well after the cut rather than one that fits to the character.