SEO title length: how long should a title tag be?

There is no official SEO title length. Google sets no character limit on the title tag, but it cuts the title link in search results to fit the screen, which on desktop works out to roughly 600 pixels, or about 50 to 60 characters of normal mixed-case text. Aim for that range, put the words people search for at the front, and accept that the brand name at the end may sometimes get clipped.

The rest of this post is about length only. For what to actually write in the title, see how to write a title tag.

Why Google truncates titles by pixels, not characters

Google's own documentation on title links says there is no limit on how long a <title> element can be. It also says the title link is truncated "as needed, typically to fit the device width." That is the whole official rule. Google publishes no character count and no pixel count.

The 600 pixel figure comes from measuring desktop results, not from Google. It holds up well in practice, and it explains why character counts mislead. Letters have different widths. A capital W takes up roughly four times the space of a lowercase i. Two titles with the same character count can land more than 100 pixels apart.

So "60 characters" is a rule of thumb that works for ordinary sentence-case titles. It breaks for titles in capitals, titles full of wide letters, and titles in scripts other than Latin.

What 600 pixels means in characters

Here are real titles measured the way our checker measures them, with Arial at 20px against a 600px desktop line:

The same 42 characters cost 120 pixels more in capitals. A 68-character lowercase title fits, while a 39-character string of wide letters nearly fills the line. Count pixels if you are near the edge. Count characters only if you need a quick estimate.

Mobile vs desktop title length

Google does not publish a mobile width either. Its documentation only says titles are cut to fit the device. On a phone the result column is much narrower than 600 pixels, but titles can wrap onto a second line, so in our model a title that fits on desktop usually fits on mobile too. The 73-character title in the table above clips on desktop and wraps cleanly onto two lines at phone width.

In practice desktop is the tighter limit for most titles, so write to it. If your traffic is mostly mobile, check a few of your own results on a phone instead of trusting any calculator, ours included.

What happens when a title is too long or too short

A long title gets clipped with an ellipsis. Nothing else happens. Google does not penalize long titles, and words past the cut still exist in the HTML. The cost is that searchers never see the end of the line, so anything that matters there is wasted. That is why the brand name goes last and the topic goes first.

Google's best practices tell you to avoid "unnecessarily long or verbose" title text, and padding a title with repeated keywords is the usual way it gets that long. Google can also replace your title with one it builds from the main heading, og:title or anchor text in links to the page. Its documented reasons are about accuracy, such as a title with an obsolete year, a title that doesn't match the page, or near-identical titles across a site. Length alone is not on that list, so a long title is a display problem first.

A short title is not penalized either. The cost is missed words. A title like "Products" or "Home" tells the searcher nothing and leaves out the terms people type. Google flags vague titles like "Home" in the same documentation. If a title is under about 30 characters, check whether it names the topic and the thing that makes the page different.

How to check your SEO title length

The On-Page SEO Checker fetches the page and reads the first non-empty <title> in the HTML. It measures the title's width in Arial at 20px and flags "Title may truncate" when it runs past the 600px desktop line, with the character count and the measured width. It flags "Title is short" below 30 characters, as information rather than a warning, because Google sets no minimum. It also reports missing titles, multiple <title> tags, a title identical to the H1, and an og:title that differs from the title. Add a target query and it lists the query words your title leaves out.

A run costs 8 credits. It checks the desktop width only, not mobile wrapping, and it reads the HTML the server returns, so a title set by JavaScript after the page loads is not seen. It cannot tell you whether Google rewrote your title in live results; search for the page to see that. For the meta description under the title, read meta description length.