Meta description too long: how long it really can be, and how to measure it

Search results cut a meta description off with “…” when it is too wide for the space. The cut-off depends on pixels, not characters, and Google does not publish an official limit. Articles that quote an exact number are quoting an estimate, and the estimates disagree: one popular guide says about 580 pixels, another says 920 to 960. This page shows you how to measure your own descriptions and what to aim for.

What to aim for

Commonly quoted figures put the desktop limit at roughly 920 to 990 pixels, about 150 to 160 characters of normal text, with mobile tighter. None of these come from Google, so treat them as a rough guide and leave a margin. A good working target is 120 to 150 characters, with the most important words first. Anything after the cut-off may simply not be read by the person searching.

Why characters mislead

Wide letters such as capitals, “m” and “w” use more room than “i” or “l”. Two descriptions of 155 characters can differ by a hundred pixels. A description in capitals gets cut earlier. So a page can pass a character count and still be flagged by a pixel check. That happened to us: our homepage description was about 2% too wide at 136 characters, and trimming it to 128 fixed it.

What Google says about descriptions

Google's snippet documentation says its systems build the snippet mostly from the page's own content, and that the meta description may be used when it describes the page better than the text does. It also says there is no fixed limit on length and that snippets are cut to fit the device's width. Two practical points follow. A meta description is not a ranking factor, so its job is to earn the click. And because Google decides per search, you are writing a good default, not a guarantee.

Measure it yourself

Paste this into your browser console. It measures the text in an Arial-style font, which is a close stand-in for how results are drawn. It is a proxy, not Google's exact font, so keep a margin below your limit:

const text = "Your meta description here";
const ctx = document.createElement("canvas").getContext("2d");
ctx.font = "14px Arial";
console.log(Math.round(ctx.measureText(text).width) + " px");

Anything above about 900 pixels is worth shortening. If you only need a rough guide, 150 characters is a safe ceiling for plain lower-case text.

Check every page at once

A single description is easy. A whole site is not. This shell loop reads your sitemap, fetches each page and prints the description length, so the longest ones come first:

curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -o "<loc>[^<]*</loc>" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | while read u; do
  d=$(curl -s "$u" | grep -o '<meta name="description" content="[^"]*"' | head -1 | sed 's/.*content="//;s/"$//')
  echo "${#d} $u"
done | sort -rn | head -20

It counts characters, not pixels, so use it to find the pages to look at, then measure those with the snippet above. A site audit does the same job and also flags descriptions that are missing, too short or duplicated.

How to shorten one without losing the point

• Front-load. Put what the page is and who it is for in the first 80 characters. Put offers and extras after.
• Cut filler such as “Welcome to”, “the best” and “we offer”.
• Keep one idea. A description that lists six things reads as none of them.
• Write one per page. Copying the same description to many pages gives search engines no reason to show it.

Where to set it

In plain HTML it is one tag in the head. In Next.js it is the metadata export of the page. In WordPress, an SEO plugin such as Yoast gives each page a field with a length meter. Whichever you use, set it per page from the template so new pages never ship without one.

<meta name="description" content="Audit your site, research keywords and track rankings in one place.">

Google may show something else anyway

Google often replaces your description with text it picks from the page to match the search. Reported rates vary and we have not found a source we trust, so we will not quote a number. The practical point: a good description still helps, because it is the version shown when it matches the query. If the same page keeps being rewritten, the page text probably answers the query better than the description does, so look at the opening paragraph too.

Where this fits

A long description is a small warning, not a ranking penalty. Another small one is a page with no outgoing links, and a long title tag is its close cousin. Fix them after the blockers in the technical SEO audit checklist, and let the audit below show you which pages are affected.

Frequently asked questions

How many characters should a meta description be?

Aim for 120 to 150 characters. There is no official limit, because Google cuts by pixel width, so measure rather than count.

Does a meta description affect rankings?

Not directly. It affects whether people click your result, which matters for traffic.

What if I do not write a meta description?

Google will build a snippet from the page text. That is fine for some pages, but a written description lets you control the first words people see.

Why does Google show a different description?

Because it picks the text that best matches the search. A longer or generic description is more likely to be replaced.

Check your own pages

Run an audit and it lists every page with a description that is too long, too short, missing or duplicated.