LaunchScaler

Free tool

Meta tag checker

See your title and meta description the way a results page prints them, with their lengths against the limits our scan grades, plus your H1 and mobile viewport tag.

No sign-up and no email. Results are not published or tied to you.

Your check shows up here

Your title, description and H1 as written, their lengths, and a preview of the search result.

How it works

Three steps, about ten seconds

01

Enter a page

Any URL. Each page has its own title and description, so check the ones that matter most.

02

We read it as Googlebot

From the HTML your server sends, before any JavaScript runs, which is what a crawler gets first.

03

We measure and preview

Title and description lengths against the limits our scan grades, and a results card drawn from them.

Reference

The tags a results page reads

What each one does and the length that fits. The limits are the ones our free scan grades against.

Meta tags, where each lives, what it does and the length that fits
TagIn the HTMLWhat it doesWhat fits
Title<title>The clickable headline of the search result.About 60 characters
Meta description<meta name="description">The snippet under the title, when Google uses yours.About 155 characters
H1<h1>The page's main heading, read as its topic.One per page
Viewport<meta name="viewport">Fits the page to a phone screen. Google indexes the mobile version.width=device-width, initial-scale=1
Canonical<link rel="canonical">Names the URL to index when several show the same page.One per page

Fix it on your platform

Set your title and description on your platform

Write both for the person searching: what the page is, in their words, inside the lengths above.

Next.js

Export metadata from the page, or generateMetadata when it depends on data:

export const metadata = {
  title: "Pricing",
  description: "What each plan includes and what it costs.",
};

WordPress

Yoast SEO and Rank Math each add an SEO title and meta description box to the post editor. Without one of them, WordPress builds the title from the post title and the site name and sets no description.

Webflow

Open the page's settings and fill in Title tag and Meta description under SEO settings.

Shopify

Open the product, page or collection in your admin and edit the search engine listing at the bottom of the page: it holds the page title and meta description.

Questions, answered

Meta tags, in plain terms

01

How long should a title tag be?

  • About 60 characters. Google sets no limit, but cuts a long title link to fit the width of the screen.
  • In Zyppy's study of 80,000 pages, Google rewrote almost every title longer than 70 characters.
02

How long should a meta description be?

  • About 155 characters. Google sets no limit, but cuts the snippet to fit the width of the screen.
03

Why does Google show a different title or snippet?

  • Google writes its own when it judges another title or snippet fits the search better, or when yours is missing, inaccurate, out of date or repeated across pages.
04

Does the meta description affect rankings?

  • Google says it does not use the meta description to rank pages.
  • It shapes the snippet, and the snippet is what people read before they decide to click.
05

Should a page have one H1?

  • Google has said several H1s do not hurt. One that names the page's topic is still the clearest structure, and it is what our scan checks for.
06

Why read the page as Googlebot?

  • Some sites send crawlers different tags from browsers, and some add tags only with JavaScript.
  • We read the HTML your server sends Googlebot before any script runs, which is what a crawler is sure to see.
07

Is it free, and do you keep my results?

  • It is free and needs no account.
  • A result stays in memory for a few minutes so a repeat check does not hit your site again, then it is gone. Nothing is saved to a database or published.

The guide

Meta description length

More free tools

One address, 156 checks, each with its fix.

No account, just the address.

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