Meta Description Length Checker

A meta description is the <meta name="description"> tag in a page's HTML head. Google may show its text as the gray snippet under the blue title in search results, so it acts as ad copy that influences click-through. This tool measures one thing: the number of characters in whatever you type, counted with JavaScript's string length. It marks anything under 120 characters as too short, 120 to 160 as ideal, and over 160 as likely to be truncated. Those thresholds are a widely used rule of thumb, not an official Google specification. Google actually truncates snippets by pixel width (roughly 920px on desktop, less on mobile), not by a fixed character count, so a line of wide capital letters can be cut sooner than a line of narrow lowercase ones. The character count here is a fast proxy, not a pixel-accurate measurement. The tool also does not check keyword relevance, read your live page, or verify that Google will even use your description, since Google frequently rewrites snippets to match the search query. Treat the count as a guardrail for drafting, not a guarantee of how the snippet displays.