Meta description length: 155 characters on desktop, 120 on mobile
Google cuts snippets at about 920 px on desktop (about 155 characters) and 680 px on mobile (about 120). Put the whole claim in the first 120.
LLaunchScaler·Published ·8 min read
Google cuts meta descriptions at roughly 920 pixels on desktop, about 155 to 160 characters, and at about 680 pixels on mobile, about 110 to 120 characters. Write descriptions of 120 to 155 characters and make the first 120 a complete statement, so the part every device shows already says what the page offers.
Neither number is a Google rule. Google's snippet documentation says "there's no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width." The widths come from measuring live results; the HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025 puts them at roughly 920 to 980 px on desktop and 680 px on mobile.
How long should a meta description be?
Aim for 120 to 155 characters. Conductor's guidelines give a desktop maximum of "155 characters or 920 pixels" and a minimum of 70 characters, and the Web Almanac measures the mobile cut at about 680 pixels. At Conductor's ratio of 920 pixels to 155 characters, 680 pixels holds roughly 115 characters, which is where the mobile budget of 110 to 120 comes from.
That gives you two lines to write for:
Where the snippet shows
Approximate cut
Rough character equivalent
What must fit
Desktop results
920 to 980 px
155 to 160 characters
The full description
Mobile results
About 680 px
110 to 120 characters
Questions, answered
What people ask about this
01
What is the best meta description length?
Write 120 to 155 characters and make the first 120 a complete statement. Desktop snippets are cut at roughly 920 pixels, about 155 characters, and mobile snippets at about 680 pixels, so the first 120 characters are what every searcher sees.
The complete claim, with nothing essential after it
Short descriptions
Under about 70 characters
Conductor's minimum
Usually too thin to be chosen; add detail
Most sites write far more than either line. The Web Almanac 2025 found the median meta description is 274 characters and 40 words, on desktop and mobile alike, and even the 25th percentile is 166 characters. At the median, more than 100 characters of every description never appear in a desktop result.
Missing descriptions are the other common state. The same chapter found meta descriptions on 67.7% of desktop pages and 67.2% of mobile pages, so about a third of pages leave the snippet entirely to Google.
Why are the cut-offs in pixels, not characters?
A snippet line has a fixed width on screen, so Google truncates where the text runs out of room, not after a set count. Wide letters such as W and M use the space faster than i, l and t, so two descriptions of the same length can end at different points. Character counts are only an average.
This matters most near the limit. A 150-character description in plain lowercase may show in full, while one of the same length with capitals, numbers and product names in title case gets cut. When a description is within 10 characters of either limit, check it in a pixel-based preview tool rather than trusting the count.
Query matches shift it further. Screaming Frog's pixel research notes that Google may bold the words that match the search, and bold text takes more pixels than regular text, so leave a margin below the cut rather than writing to the last pixel.
How often does Google show the meta description you wrote?
Less often than most people expect. Ahrefs studied 20,000 keywords and 192,656 pages and found Google rewrote the meta description 62.78% of the time, so the supplied description appeared in about 37% of results. Google's own documentation says snippets are "primarily created from the page content itself."
The reason is that snippets are built per query. Google says snippets are "designed to emphasize and preview the page content that best relates to a user's specific search," so "Google Search might show different snippets for different searches." A description written for the page's main query is often replaced for every other query the page ranks for.
The Ahrefs breakdown shows where rewrites come from:
Finding (Ahrefs, 2020)
Rewrite rate
All keywords studied
62.78%
High-volume ("fat head") keywords
59.65%
Long-tail keywords
65.62%
Descriptions longer than the recommended length
61.46%
Descriptions within the recommended length
63.69%
The last two rows are the useful ones for this question. Length barely changed whether Google used a description. It changes what the searcher sees when Google does use it: a description that runs past the cut ends in an ellipsis, and one written to fit ends on your last word.
When Google ignores your description even though it fits, the causes are usually elsewhere: the tag is not in the served HTML, it duplicates other pages, or it does not match the query. Meta description not showing in Google goes through each of them.
How do you write one description that works on desktop and mobile?
Put the complete claim in the first 120 characters, then use the rest for a detail that is useful but not essential. Mobile readers get a finished sentence, and desktop readers get the sentence plus the extra. Google's own guidance adds that each description should be unique to its page and should summarise the page rather than list keywords.
Follow these steps for each page that earns search traffic:
Write the one sentence that tells a searcher what the page gives them. Name the product or topic and the outcome.
Check that sentence is under 120 characters. If it runs over, cut adjectives before you cut facts.
Add a second, short sentence with a concrete detail: a price, a free tier, a number of steps, a date, an author.
Stop before 155 characters. If the total is between 145 and 160, check it in a pixel preview.
Read the title and description together. They show as a pair, so the description should add to the title rather than repeat it. The title's widths are in title tag length.
Examples, measured by character count:
Description
Characters
Verdict
Acme sends invoices in two clicks and chases late payers by email, so freelancers get paid on time. Free for 5 clients; no card needed.
135
Works on both: the claim ends at character 99, the detail fits desktop
Acme is the all-in-one platform for freelancers, agencies and small businesses who want to manage invoicing, billing, payments, expenses, time tracking, client portals, reporting and taxes in one place, with integrations for Stripe, PayPal, QuickBooks, Xero and more than 40 other tools.
287
Cut mid-list on both; the first 120 characters still have not said what it does
Fits, but Google says keyword lists are "less likely to be displayed as a snippet"
For large sites, generated descriptions are fine. Google says programmatic generation "can be appropriate and are encouraged" for database-driven pages, as long as the results are "human-readable and diverse." Build them from page-specific data (the product name, its category, its price or its count of items) rather than a shared sentence with one word swapped.
What else does a meta description need to be valid?
It must be a <meta name="description"> element in the <head>, with a content attribute that parses. It should be unique to the page. And it must not contain a character that ends the attribute early, which is the most common way a correct-looking description breaks.
The tag itself:
<meta name="description" content="Acme sends invoices in two clicks and chases late payers by email, so freelancers get paid on time. Free for 5 clients; no card needed.">
Check these points:
One description per page. Google says identical or similar descriptions on every page "aren't helpful," and suggests site-level descriptions only on the homepage and other aggregation pages.
No raw double quotes inside a double-quoted attribute. The HTML standard says a double-quoted attribute value "must not contain any literal U+0022 QUOTATION MARK characters," so content="The "fast" invoicing app" ends at the second quote. Use ", single quotes, or rephrase. Templates that insert text from a CMS field need to escape it.
The tag must be in the served HTML, not added later by JavaScript. Crawlers that do not run scripts never see it; the Next.js documentation names Facebook's facebookexternalhit as one of them.
nosnippet and max-snippet override it. Google says nosnippet prevents a snippet entirely, and max-snippet:[number] sets a maximum length, so a max-snippet:50 left in a robots meta tag cuts your description to 50 characters whatever you wrote.
Which pages need a hand-written description?
Start with the pages that already earn clicks or get shared, and let Google write the rest. Google's advice is to "prioritize your content," and at least describe critical URLs like the homepage and popular pages. Ahrefs reaches the same order: pages with organic traffic, pages targeting a primary keyword, and pages people share.
For a small SaaS site that usually means the homepage, pricing, each feature or use-case page, the signup page and the ten most-visited blog posts. Blog templates are where overlong descriptions breed, because they often copy the first paragraph of the post; set a separate description field and cap it in the template. If Google rewrites a title and description together, the pattern-by-pattern fixes in why Google rewrites your title tags apply to the title half.
Check your descriptions before Google picks its own
To see what a page sends right now, run the free scan on LaunchScaler. It needs only the URL, no account, and its search checks flag a page with no meta description (where Google has to write the snippet itself) and a description long enough to be cut off mid-sentence. The same run checks the title length and whether invalid markup in the <head> pushes meta tags into the <body>, where they stop counting.
Google sets none. Its documentation says there is no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated as needed to fit the device width.
03
What happens if a meta description is too long?
Google cuts it with an ellipsis at the display width, or ignores it and builds a snippet from the page. Ahrefs found length made little difference to rewrites: 61.46% for long descriptions against 63.69% for ones within the recommended length.
04
How often does Google use my meta description?
In Ahrefs' study of 20,000 keywords, Google rewrote the meta description 62.78% of the time, so a supplied description appeared about 37% of the time. Google builds snippets per query, and long-tail queries saw more rewrites (65.62%) than high-volume ones (59.65%).
05
How many words is 155 characters?
About 23 words, going by the Web Almanac 2025 median of 274 characters in 40 words. That median description is well past what a snippet can show on any device.
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