The character limits that matter: SERP titles, meta descriptions, OG tags, subject lines
By Flavio Copes
How Google truncates titles by pixels not characters, the real limits for OG tags and email subjects, and practical targets to write to.
You write a great title, publish, and Google shows it as “The Complete Guide to Building Modern Web Applic…”.
Every place your text appears — search results, social cards, email inboxes — has a cutoff. Write past it and the ending disappears, usually taking your point with it.
Let’s go through the limits that actually matter, and the targets I write to.
Google truncates by pixels, not characters
This is the part most “SEO checklists” get wrong. Google doesn’t count characters in your title. It measures pixel width — roughly 580px on desktop — and cuts whatever doesn’t fit.
That’s why “60 characters” is a guideline, not a rule. Sixty characters of narrow letters like “illicit” fit easily. Sixty characters of wide capitals like “WWW” won’t. The character count is a proxy for the real pixel limit.
What happens when you go over? Google either cuts the title mid-sentence with an ellipsis, or — and this is the annoying one — rewrites it entirely. Long titles are one of the main triggers for Google substituting its own title, often pulled from your H1 or anchor text pointing at the page.
Practical targets:
- Title: ~60 characters. Front-load the keywords and the point. If it gets cut, the ellipsis should eat the least important part
- Meta description: ~160 characters. Also pixel-based. Google rewrites descriptions freely too, but a good one within the limit gets used more often
The description doesn’t affect ranking. It affects whether people click. Same rules I described back in SEO for developers writing blogs: write it for a human scanning a results page.
Here’s what the tags look like:
<title>SPF, DKIM, and DMARC explained for developers</title>
<meta name="description" content="Why email from your domain lands in spam, what each DNS record verifies, and the rollout order from p=none to p=reject.">That title is 45 characters. Room to spare.
Open Graph and Twitter cards
When someone shares your page on social platforms, the preview card comes from your OG tags:
<meta property="og:title" content="SPF, DKIM, and DMARC explained for developers">
<meta property="og:description" content="Why email from your domain lands in spam, and how to fix it with three DNS records.">The limits are looser and fuzzier than Google’s:
- og:title: ~60 characters. Facebook and LinkedIn truncate somewhere in the 60–90 range depending on layout, so 60 is the safe target
- og:description: ~200 characters. But the card layouts often clamp earlier — keep the hook in the first 150
- twitter:title: ~70 characters for summary cards
- X/Twitter post itself: 280 characters (the standard limit; Premium allows more)
- LinkedIn post preview: ~210 characters visible before the “…see more” fold
The pattern across all of these: the number is a ceiling, but the first sentence is what actually gets read. Put the payoff there.
Email subject lines
Email has two different limits, and they’re for different reasons.
The recommended limit: ~50 characters. This one comes from screens. Mobile mail clients show roughly 35–50 characters of subject before cutting off, and most email is opened on a phone. Desktop Gmail shows more, but you write for the worst case.
The compatibility target: 78 characters. RFC 5322 recommends lines no longer than 78 characters, excluding the line ending. The protocol limit is 998 characters per line, but that is not a useful subject-line target.
So: aim for 50, try to stay under 78, and put the interesting word first. “Your invoice for June is ready” beats “We are writing to inform you that your invoice…” — the second one dies at the exact moment it was about to say something. This matters a lot once you run an email list, where the subject line decides your open rate.
YouTube, since we’re counting
YouTube titles: 100 characters, and this one is a real hard limit — the upload form rejects anything longer. Display truncates much earlier though, around 60–70 characters in search and suggested videos.
Meta keywords: zero
While we’re on meta tags: <meta name="keywords"> has been dead since about 2009. Google confirmed it ignores it entirely. If a checklist or a plugin still asks you to fill it in, that tells you how old the checklist is. Search engines moved on to reading signals you can’t just type in — including how you handle crawlers.
The cheat sheet
| Where | Target | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Google SERP title | ~60 chars | ~580px pixel limit |
| Google SERP description | ~160 chars | pixel-based too |
| og:title | ~60 chars | platforms cut at 60–90 |
| og:description | ~200 chars | hook in first 150 |
| twitter:title | ~70 chars | summary cards |
| X/Twitter post | 280 chars | standard limit |
| LinkedIn preview | ~210 chars | before “see more” |
| Email subject | 50 chars (78 recommended) | mobile clients / RFC 5322 |
| YouTube title | 100 chars | rejected above that |
Rather than counting by hand, I built a character limits checker — type your title or subject once and it shows the count against every limit at the same time, with a preview of exactly where each platform cuts it off.
My workflow: write the title naturally first, then check it. If it’s over, don’t just trim the end — rewrite so the important words come first. The limit is a forcing function for better titles anyway.
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