Title tag length: how many characters before Google cuts it off
Google cuts desktop title links at about 600 px, roughly 50 to 60 characters. Titles over 70 characters get rewritten almost every time.
LLaunchScaler·Published ·10 min read
Google truncates title links at about 600 pixels on desktop, which works out to roughly 50 to 60 characters of ordinary text. Keep each title inside that width, and aim for 51 to 55 characters: in an 80,959-title study by Zyppy, that range had the lowest rewrite rate, while titles over 70 characters were rewritten 99.9% of the time.
Google itself publishes no character limit. Its title link documentation says "there's no limit on how long a <title> element can be," and then adds the part that matters: "the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width." The numbers below come from measurement, not from a Google rule, so treat them as the width to design for rather than a hard cut.
How long should a title tag be?
Write titles of 50 to 60 characters, which fit inside Zyppy's measured 600-pixel desktop limit, and put the words that match the search first. Zyppy's own takeaways are to keep the title under 600 pixels so Google shows it in full, and to target 51 to 55 characters to reduce the chance of a rewrite.
Two numbers frame the range. At the short end, Zyppy found Google typically displays at least 30 characters (about 285 pixels), and titles of 1 to 5 characters, such as "Home", were rewritten 96.6% of the time. At the long end, the same study found that titles over 70 characters were rewritten 99.9% of the time.
Most of the web is outside that range. The HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025 puts the median title at 77 characters on desktop and 79 on mobile, and a quarter of pages run to 116 characters or more. If your template produces titles like the median page, Google is choosing your search result text for you.
Title length
What Zyppy measured
What to do
1 to 5 characters
Rewritten 96.6% of the time
Add what the page is about; "Home" and "Profile" are the examples Google calls vague
Questions, answered
What people ask about this
01
What is the ideal title tag length?
Keep the title between 50 and 60 characters, or under about 600 pixels, so Google shows it in full on desktop. Zyppy's study of 80,959 titles found the 51 to 60 character range had the lowest rewrite rate, between 39% and 42%.
The minimum Google typically displays (about 285 px)
Fine if the page topic is short, but you are leaving room unused
51 to 60 characters
Lowest rewrite rate, 39% to 42%
The target band
Over 70 characters
Rewritten 99.9% of the time
Cut it; the end will not be shown as written
Overall, Zyppy found Google rewrote 61.6% of the titles it studied, measured in the first quarter of 2022. Google's own figure from September 2021 is that its system uses the HTML title element "around 87% of the time." The two numbers measure different things (Zyppy counts any change, including a trimmed site name), but both say the same thing for your template: a title that is too long or too vague is the one Google replaces first.
Why does Google measure titles in pixels instead of characters?
Search results have a fixed width, so the cut happens at a pixel position, not after a set number of characters. Wide letters use the space faster than narrow ones. Zyppy's example is that "WWW" is much wider than "iii" even though both are three characters, which is why a 60-character title can fit while a 52-character one does not.
The gap between letters is large. Set in Arial at 20 px, a capital W measures 18.9 px and a lowercase i measures 4.4 px, so one W takes the room of about four i's. Thirty W's in a row come to 566 px, close to the whole desktop width, while thirty i's take 133 px. Titles full of capitals, "m" and "w" hit the limit early; titles with many "i", "l", "t" and "f" run longer before they are cut.
You can measure any title in the browser before you publish it. Open DevTools on the page, go to the Console tab and run:
That prints the character count and an estimated pixel width. Google does not publish the font it sets title links in, and outside measurements of it have changed over the years, so read the result as an estimate: anything under about 560 px is safe, and anything over 600 px will be cut on desktop. Pixel length checkers do the same calculation for a list of titles at once.
What happens when a title is too long?
Google does one of two things with a long title: it shows the start and cuts the rest with an ellipsis, or it writes a different title link from other text on the page. Zyppy's data says the second is far more common past 70 characters. Either way, the words at the end of your title are the ones that disappear.
A long title carries no penalty. Zyppy states it plainly ("There is no penalty for long title tags"), and Google's documentation treats length as a display question. The cost is indirect: you lose control of the one line people read before they click.
Google lists the sources it draws a replacement from: the <title> element, the main visual title on the page, heading elements such as <h1>, the og:title meta tag, other large and prominent text, other text on the page, anchor text on the page, the text of links pointing to the page, and WebSite structured data. If your title is long and your <h1> is short and clear, the <h1> is a likely replacement. The full list of triggers is in why Google rewrites title tags.
Mobile gives you slightly more room. Zyppy found Google can display titles of 70 to 80 characters on mobile, and expects fewer mobile rewrites for that reason. Write for desktop anyway, because a title that fits 600 px on desktop fits everywhere.
How do you write a title that fits and still gets clicked?
Start with the words a searcher would type, follow with what makes the page different, and end with the brand. Keep it to one idea per page. Google asks for descriptive, concise titles that are distinct on every page, with the site name placed at the beginning or end and separated by a delimiter.
Follow these steps for each page template:
Write down the query the page should rank for, in the searcher's words. For a pricing page that might be "invoicing software pricing"; for a feature page, "recurring invoices for freelancers".
Put those words at the start of the title. Zyppy found Google typically displays at least the first 30 characters, so that is where the query words belong.
Add one specific detail that no other page on your site has: the plan names, the year, the number of steps, the platform.
End with the brand, separated by a hyphen or colon. Zyppy found Google removed or replaced pipes 41.0% of the time and dashes only 19.7% of the time, so a hyphen is the safer separator.
Count the result. Stay under 60 characters and under about 560 px in the console snippet above.
Make the <h1> say the same thing. Zyppy found that when a number appeared in both the title and the H1, Google kept a number in the displayed title 97.3% of the time, against 2.3% when the two disagreed.
Some before and after examples, measured the same way:
Title
Characters
Estimated width (Arial 20 px)
Problem
Acme | Home
11
121 px
Vague; "Home" is the example Google calls out
Acme - Invoicing, billing, payments and accounting software for freelancers, agencies and small teams
101
906 px
Over 70 characters and a keyword list
Invoicing software for freelancers - Acme
41
361 px
Fits; query first, brand last
Acme pricing: Free, Pro and Team plans compared
47
451 px
Fits, and the plan names make it distinct
Two patterns cost you the most. The first is keyword stuffing: Google's example is "Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars", which it says "can make your results look spammy". The second is boilerplate, such as a long shared suffix like "See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts" on every page. A shared suffix eats characters on every page and pushes the words that differ past the cut.
The title and the meta description are read together in the result, so write them as a pair. The description has its own widths, about 920 px on desktop and 680 px on mobile, covered in meta description length. If Google ignores the description you wrote, why Google shows other text instead of your meta description covers the causes.
How do you set a consistent title suffix in Next.js?
Use title.template in the root layout, so every page title gets the same short brand suffix without each page repeating it. The template applies to titles set in child route segments, %s is replaced by the page's own title, and a default is required whenever you define a template.
In the App Router:
// app/layout.tsx
import type { Metadata } from "next";
export const metadata: Metadata = {
title: {
template: "%s - Acme",
default: "Acme: invoicing software for freelancers",
},
};
// app/pricing/page.tsx
import type { Metadata } from "next";
export const metadata: Metadata = {
title: "Invoicing software pricing: Free, Pro and Team plans",
};
// Output: <title>Invoicing software pricing: Free, Pro and Team plans - Acme</title>
The page title is 52 characters and the output is 59, which shows why the suffix counts against your budget: " - Acme" is 7 characters and about 68 px on every page. Budget each page title at 60 characters minus the suffix length.
Three rules from the Next.js documentation trip people up:
title.template applies to child segments only. A template defined in app/layout.tsx does not apply to a title set in app/page.tsx of the same segment, and a template set in any page.tsx has no effect because a page has no children.
A page that sets no title of its own inherits the closest parent's resolved title, so every page without one ends up with the same default. That is the duplicate-title pattern Google treats as boilerplate.
title.absolute ignores the parent template. Use it where the brand should lead or where the suffix would push the title past the width, for example title: { absolute: "Acme: invoicing software for freelancers" } on a landing page.
For pages built from data, return the title from generateMetadata and trim it in code before the template adds the suffix. A blog post template is the usual source of overlong titles, because post titles are written for the page, not the search result. The SEO blog post template covers how to set a separate SEO title per post.
How do you check title length across a whole site?
Crawl the site and sort every page by title length and pixel width, then fix templates rather than single pages. Most overlong titles come from one pattern, such as a product name plus a category plus a long brand line, and one change to that template fixes every page it builds.
A practical order:
Export every URL's title from a crawler, or read them from your CMS or database.
Flag titles over 60 characters and titles under 30.
Group the flagged titles by template (blog, docs, product, category) and fix the template's pattern first.
Find duplicates: any title shared by two or more URLs.
After publishing the fix, request indexing for the most important pages in Search Console's URL Inspection tool. Google says it has to recrawl and reprocess the page before it notices updated titles, which may take a few days to a few weeks.
To check a live page right now, run the free scan on LaunchScaler. It takes a URL and needs no account, and its search checks flag a title long enough to be truncated or rewritten, and a title that is missing, half-empty (only the brand, like "| Acme") or a vague placeholder. The same run reads the meta description, the H1 and the rest of the page's search, AI visibility, security, speed and compliance checks, so you can fix the title and the tags around it in one pass.
No. Google says there is no limit on how long a title element can be, but the title link is truncated in search results as needed to fit the device width. Anything past roughly 600 pixels on desktop is cut off with an ellipsis or replaced.
03
Does a long title tag hurt SEO?
There is no penalty for a long title, but Google rarely shows it as written. In Zyppy's study, titles over 70 characters were rewritten 99.9% of the time, so the words you chose for the search result are usually lost.
04
How many pixels wide is a Google title?
Zyppy measured the desktop display limit at 600 pixels. On mobile, Google can show longer titles, often up to 70 to 80 characters, so a title that fits desktop fits mobile too.
05
Should the brand name go at the start or end of the title?
At the end, unless the page is your homepage. Google recommends putting the site name at the beginning or end with a delimiter, and the end keeps the words that match the query inside the visible width.
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