SERP snippet preview

What a search snippet is

Each ordinary result in Google is made of a few parts, which Google names in its visual elements gallery:

• Site name and favicon: the name of the site and its small icon. Google picks the name itself; the WebSite structured data on your homepage is the main way to tell it your preference.
• Visible URL: the page's address in a readable form, in two parts: the domain and a breadcrumb trail showing where the page sits on the site, such as https://example.com › blog › post.
• Title link: the clickable headline, which Google builds from your title tag and other text on the page.
• Snippet: the description under the title, built from the page's text or its meta description.

The title and the snippet are what a searcher reads to decide whether to click, which is why the length and the first words of each matter.

Why title and description length matter

Google sets no length limit for either. Its title link guide and its snippet guide both say the text is truncated as needed, "typically to fit the device width". What doesn't fit is replaced with dots, and the end of a title is often where the key point or the brand sits.

Google measures in pixels, not characters. A W is more than four times as wide as an i, so two titles of the same length can be cut at different places. In the 600 pixels a desktop title gets in SEO tools' previews, 20px Arial holds about 55 to 60 characters of a title written in title case and a few more in lowercase. A description is cut at about 985 pixels, which wraps to roughly two lines on desktop and about three on a phone.

Why Google rewrites titles and descriptions

Google writes title links automatically. Its title link guide lists the sources it uses: the title element, the main title shown on the page, headings such as the H1, og:title, other large or prominent text, anchor text on the page, the text of links pointing to the page, and WebSite structured data. It may write a different title when it finds a problem, for example:

• a half-empty title, such as only the site name;
• an old date in a title that should have been updated;
• a title that doesn't match what the page is about;
• the same boilerplate title on many pages;
• no clear main heading on the page;
• a title in a different language or script from the page's content;
• the site name repeated.

Snippets work differently. According to Google's snippet guide, they come mainly from the page's content, and Google uses the meta description when it gives a more accurate picture of the page. Snippets are chosen to match each search, so the same page can show different text for different searches.

After you change a title or description, Google has to crawl and process the page again before results show it, which Google's title link guide says can take from a few days to a few weeks.

How to write a good title

• Say what the page offers, in specific words. "Handmade Silk Sarees | Your Brand" tells a searcher more than "Home" or "Shop", and Google advises against vague titles like "Home".
• Put the main words first, so a cut only takes the less important end.
• Give every page its own title. Pages that share one are hard to tell apart, and Google may rewrite them.
• Brand it briefly. Google suggests putting the site name at the start or the end, separated by a hyphen, colon or pipe.
• Don't repeat keywords. Google's own example of a title that doesn't help is a list of variations of one word.
• Keep dates current, or leave them out of pages you don't update every year.
• Match the page's main heading, since Google reads the H1 when it writes title links.

When Site Health suggests a new title for one of your pages, it aims for 40 to 60 characters. On Shopify, the Shopify SEO checklist covers titles and the other checks, with where to fix each one. Writing a blog post title? The blog title checker looks at more than length.

How to write a good meta description

• Sum up the page and give a reason to click, in about 150 characters, so it fits before the cut.
• Write one for each page. Google suggests site-level text for the homepage and page-specific text elsewhere; a description copied across pages describes none of them well.
• Include the useful details. Google's examples: for a product, its price, age or maker; for an article, its author and publication date.
• Generate them from your data on a large site, which Google says is fine as long as every description reads naturally and differs from the others.
• Skip keyword lists and vague, very short descriptions.

How this preview measures

• Fonts and widths follow Yoast SEO's open-source search result preview: titles in 20px Arial on one line of 600 pixels on desktop and up to two lines of 368 pixels on mobile (a 400 pixel card with 16 pixels of padding), descriptions in 14px Arial.
• Descriptions are cut once the text, set on one line, passes about 985 pixels, Screaming Frog's estimate of Google's limit, and then wrap to the result's width. The preview uses the same estimate on mobile.
• Tools disagree by a few dozen pixels: Screaming Frog flags titles over 561 pixels, for example. Treat every cut-off point here as an estimate.
• Google's own results use other fonts. When we compared them with this preview on October 19, 2026, Google's desktop results set titles at 22px in its own typeface, Google Sans, in a column about 652 pixels wide, and descriptions at 14px in Roboto. A line held about as much text as the Arial widths here, and the descriptions Google had cut ended at about 950 to 1,000 pixels.
• Widths are measured in your browser with the canvas measureText function, in Arial or a font with the same widths. When neither is available, the preview uses a built-in table of Arial's character widths instead.
• A cut title or description keeps the last whole word that fits with " ..." after it, and drops a separator such as | or : left at the end.
• The address shows https:// (or http://), the domain and the parts of the path, decoded, without the query string, in 12px text, as Google's results showed addresses on that day. It is cut at about 300 pixels with "...", inside a word if need be, which is where Google cut the long ones; the preview cuts it there on mobile too. Google may show a different trail, for example from breadcrumb structured data.
• Characters are counted exactly as BlogAmplify's Site Health counts them: runs of spaces as one, entities such as & decoded, an accented letter or a simple emoji as one character.

It leaves out what Google adds on its own: dates, ratings, images, sitelinks, words in bold that match the search, AI Overviews and your real favicon (the preview draws your site name's first letter instead).

BlogAmplify's Site Health limits

BlogAmplify's Site Health checks the titles and meta descriptions of every page in your sitemap. It counts characters, so a number means the same on every page and in its suggestions; the limits are the usual character equivalents of Google's pixel cut. The tool above runs the same checks on one page.

Shared titles and descriptions need the whole site, so this page can't check them. Site Health can, along with broken links, redirects, missing headings and the other checks on its list.