How long should a meta description be?

Between 70 and 160 characters, which lands under the 920 pixels the desktop snippet draws. seodraft's rules stop a draft at 160. On a phone the line ends near 680 pixels, so the first sentence has to carry the message.

How long should a title tag be?

About 60 characters, and under 600 pixels. Arial draws a capital W more than four times wider than a lowercase i, so two titles of 60 characters land on opposite sides of the cut.

Why count pixels when there is a character count?

Google ends the snippet at a width. A character count reads "mill" and "WWWW" as the same length, and the second draws about three times wider, so the pixel estimate is what predicts the cut.

Can I check a page by its URL?

Yes. Paste the address and the checker fetches the HTML, reads the title tag, the meta description, the Open Graph tags and the canonical link, then measures them. A title or a description you type wins over the fetched one, so you can try a rewrite against the live page.

Does Google show the description I write?

Google shows it when the tag answers the query someone typed, and replaces it with text from the page when the page answers better. A description written for the query the page targets survives more often.

Does the keyword have to be in the title?

In the title, yes, inside the first 60 characters, which is the rule seodraft applies to every draft. In the description it earns its place because Google bolds the words from the query inside the snippet.

Meta description checker with SERP preview

Paste a title and a description, or a URL, and see the snippet Google can draw from them. The check measures the pixel width on desktop and on a phone, counts the characters against seodraft's own ceilings, and says where your keyword lands.

Free, no sign-up

Title tag

0 characters (max 60) · about 0px of 600px · fits

Meta description

0 characters (max 160) · about 0px of 920px · fits

Keyword (optional)

Preview

your-site.com

Your title tag

Your meta description appears here as Google would draw it.

Run it from your agent

The check on this page is also a JSON endpoint and a tool on a public MCP server. Neither needs an account or a key.

JSON endpoint

curl -X POST https://seodraft.app/api/tools/meta-description-checker \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"title":"Meta description checker with SERP preview","description":"Paste a title and a meta description, see where Google cuts them, and check the keyword is in both before the page ships.","keyword":"meta description checker"}'

Free MCP server

Add this URL to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any MCP client. It exposes every free tool, with no sign-in.

https://seodraft.app/tools/mcp  ·  check_title_and_description

This page for agents

The same guide and the API contract, as Markdown. /tools/meta-description-checker.md

What a good title and description look like

A good title names the page in about 60 characters and carries the keyword near the front, where the snippet still shows it. Google draws the title in Arial at about 20px and ends the line near 600 pixels, so a title full of wide letters runs out of room before the character count says so.

A good description answers the query in one or two sentences, between 70 and 160 characters. The desktop snippet ends near 920 pixels and the phone one near 680 pixels, which puts the last clause at risk on a phone.

seodraft holds a draft to the same numbers: 60 characters for the title, 160 for the description, and the keyword inside the first 60 characters of the title.

How the pixel check works

The checker measures each character against a width table for Arial, the font Google renders snippets in, then scales it by the size of the line: about 20px for the title, about 14px for the description.

The number is an estimate. Kerning, hinting and the reader's own font settings move the drawn pixel by a few units, and Google publishes no limit to check it against. Read a title at 590px as a title at the edge.

Each preview string cuts at the last whole word that fits and adds an ellipsis, the way a snippet ends in the results page. The desktop and phone previews come from the same text at two widths.

What each finding means

Every finding carries a severity and the field it belongs to. Critical means the tag is absent, and Google writes that line from the page instead.

Warning covers a tag that exists and still loses the reader: a title past the cut, a description under 70 characters, the same sentence in both fields, capitals, or a keyword that never appears. Info reports something worth knowing, such as a description that survives the desktop line and cuts on a phone, or Open Graph tags that disagree with the meta tags.

The keyword findings are the ones to fix first. A keyword that sits past the visible cut reads to a searcher as a keyword that is missing.

The limits of this check

The check reads two strings and, when you give a URL, the tags in that page's HTML. Google rewrites descriptions when the tag answers a different question from the one someone typed, and this check sees none of that: no query, no competing results.

A page that renders its tags in the browser returns nothing to read here. The URL mode reads at most 1.5 MB of HTML, gives up after 8 seconds and stays on the site you named, so a redirect to another domain stops the check.

A clean result means the two tags are the right size and carry the keyword. What appears in the results page stays Google's decision.

Questions

How long should a meta description be?: Between 70 and 160 characters, which lands under the 920 pixels the desktop snippet draws. seodraft's rules stop a draft at 160. On a phone the line ends near 680 pixels, so the first sentence has to carry the message.
How long should a title tag be?: About 60 characters, and under 600 pixels. Arial draws a capital W more than four times wider than a lowercase i, so two titles of 60 characters land on opposite sides of the cut.
Why count pixels when there is a character count?: Google ends the snippet at a width. A character count reads "mill" and "WWWW" as the same length, and the second draws about three times wider, so the pixel estimate is what predicts the cut.
Can I check a page by its URL?: Yes. Paste the address and the checker fetches the HTML, reads the title tag, the meta description, the Open Graph tags and the canonical link, then measures them. A title or a description you type wins over the fetched one, so you can try a rewrite against the live page.
Does Google show the description I write?: Google shows it when the tag answers the query someone typed, and replaces it with text from the page when the page answers better. A description written for the query the page targets survives more often.
Does the keyword have to be in the title?: In the title, yes, inside the first 60 characters, which is the rule seodraft applies to every draft. In the description it earns its place because Google bolds the words from the query inside the snippet.

The full process runs in seodraft

Inside seodraft the same ceilings run as a rule on every draft: 60 characters for the title, 160 for the description, and the keyword inside the first 60 characters of the title, checked before the human approves the article.

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