Meta description checker
Paste a URL. We read the meta description, count it, and measure how wide it actually renders - because the SERP truncates on width, not on characters.
Free, no account, no card. One URL at a time.
What this checks
- That there is one
- A page with no description hands Google the job of quoting something from the body instead.
- Length
- Against the 50 to 165 characters the full audit uses.
- Rendered width
- Measured in pixels against roughly 1,300 - the same measurement the audit runs, calibrated from Arial's own advance widths.
- Duplicates in the head
- More than one description tag, where only the first counts.
Why it matters
The description is not a ranking factor and it is still worth writing, because it is the sentence that decides whether the click happens. Google rewrites it often - roughly when it thinks the page has a better answer to that particular query - but it starts from what you wrote.
Character counts are a proxy for the real limit and they are wrong in both directions. A description full of capitals and wide letters gets cut at 140 characters; one full of i's and l's survives past 170. That is why this measures width.
Put the point in the first hundred pixels. Whatever is at the end is what disappears.
Questions
- What length should I aim for?
- Between 50 and 165 characters, and under about 1,300 pixels as rendered. The tool reports both, and width is the one that decides truncation.
- Google rewrote mine anyway. Does it matter?
- It matters for the queries where it does not rewrite, which is most of them for pages with a clear description. A missing one is rewritten every time.
- Do you check every page?
- This tool checks one URL. A full audit checks every page it crawls, and also finds descriptions duplicated across pages - which one URL cannot show you.
One URL is a spot check
The full audit covers missing descriptions, length, pixel width and duplicates across pages - across every page it crawls, with a score and a ranked list of what to fix first.