# The character limits that matter: SERP titles, meta descriptions, OG tags, subject lines
> How Google truncates titles by pixels not characters, the real limits for OG tags and email subjects, and practical targets to write to.
Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2026-08-09 | Updated: 2026-08-03 | Topics: [Blogging](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/blogging/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/character-limits-titles-descriptions/
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](https://flaviocopes.com/seo-for-developers/): write it for a human scanning a results page.
Here's what the tags look like:
```html
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC explained for developers
```
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:
```html
```
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](https://flaviocopes.com/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: `` 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](https://flaviocopes.com/robots-txt-ai-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](https://flaviocopes.com/tools/char-limits/) — 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.