Title tag checker
Paste a URL. We read the title tag and measure it the way the search result does - in pixels, not characters.
Free, no account, no card. One URL at a time.
What this checks
- That there is one
- A page without a title gets one written for it, from whatever Google thinks fits.
- Length
- Against the 15 to 60 characters the full audit uses.
- Rendered width
- Against 561 pixels - the desktop cut-off Screaming Frog, Moz and Conductor all sit within a few pixels of.
- More than one title tag
- Only the first is used. A second is usually a template writing over itself.
Why it matters
'Illinois Millwrights' is 21 characters and renders wider than 27 i's. Any tool counting characters is measuring the wrong thing, which is why both this and the full audit measure width.
The front of the title does the work. Google truncates the end, and a reader scanning ten results reads the first two or three words of each - so the specific thing goes first and the brand goes last.
One more thing this cannot tell you from a single URL: whether the title is unique. Duplicate titles across a site are one of the most common findings in a full crawl, and by definition they need more than one page to see.
Questions
- How long should a title be?
- Short enough to render under 561 pixels - usually 50 to 60 characters, fewer if the words are wide. The tool measures your actual title rather than guessing from the count.
- Does Google always show my title?
- No. It rewrites titles when it thinks the page answers a query better than the title suggests, often by substituting an H1 or the site name. A clear, specific title is rewritten less.
- Should the brand name be in every title?
- It is a reasonable default and it costs width. If a title is close to the limit, the brand at the end is the first thing to drop.
One URL is a spot check
The full audit covers missing, short, long, truncated and duplicate titles - across every page it crawls, with a score and a ranked list of what to fix first.