Free tool
Title and description checker
See your page as a search result - measured in pixels, not characters, because that is what actually decides where Google cuts it off.
Why the room left over changes with your capitals.
Google cuts a title when it runs out of room, not at a character count - and a capital W
takes four times the space of a lowercase l. So this measures the actual width behind the
scenes and tells you the answer in characters, which is the part you can edit. It is a
close estimate rather than a promise: the real cut-off moves with the device and the font
Google serves. The character limits come from the same analyser behind the Site Health
score on a Webkio site, so the two cannot disagree.
Questions
Because Google cuts a title when it runs out of room, not at a character count, and letters are different widths - a capital W takes about four times the space of a lowercase l. "WHOLESALE MACHINERY WAREHOUSE BIRMINGHAM" and "illustration in little italic titles" are both 40 characters and the first is nearly twice as wide. So the same 26-character title has room for 22 more characters in capitals and 37 in lowercase. Tools that only count characters tell you a wide title is fine when it is not.
A close estimate rather than a promise. The width is worked out from Arial's letter widths, which is near enough to what Google renders on desktop, but the real cut-off moves with the device, the font actually served, and whatever Google decides to do with your snippet that day. It is considerably better than counting characters and it is not a guarantee.
No. It rewrites titles and descriptions when it thinks something on the page answers the search better - for a large share of results. Writing a good one makes it more likely yours is used and gives it something decent to choose from. Nobody can promise it is shown, and anyone who does is guessing.
What the page is and whose it is. "Home" tells a searcher nothing; "Carpet cleaning in Bristol - Smith & Sons" tells them both. Put the useful part first, because that is the part that survives truncation.
The character thresholds are, exactly - they come from the same analyser that produces the Site Health score, so the two cannot disagree. The pixel measurement is extra, and only on this page.