SERP preview & on-page analysis.

Google truncates your title by pixels, not characters — so the 60-character rule is a myth and we measure the real thing. Then the heading tree, alt coverage and link counts, page by page.

Your title and description are the only part of your website most people ever read. This section shows you what Google will actually print — and it measures the thing Google actually measures, which is not the thing you were told to count.

Google truncates by pixels, not characters

The “keep your title under 60 characters” rule is a myth. Google does not count your characters. It renders your title in a font and cuts it off when it runs out of width.

Which means characters are a terrible proxy, because they are wildly different widths:

same character count, very different widths// 31 characters of narrow letters — fits easily
"illinois illinois illinois illi"

// 31 characters of wide letters — nearly twice as wide
"WOMBAT WOMBAT WOMBAT WOMBAT WOM"

An i is roughly a quarter the width of a W. A long title in narrow lowercase can fit where a shorter one in wide capitals gets cut in half. Counting characters tells you almost nothing; measuring pixels tells you the answer.

So we measure the pixels. Every title and description in your audit is measured at the font size Google renders it at, and the preview cuts it off exactly where Google would.

// IT'S AN ESTIMATE, AND A GOOD ONE

We approximate the rendered width rather than asking Google — Google doesn't offer an API for it. It's accurate enough to tell you whether you're safe, close, or getting cut. Treat a bar sitting at 98% as “too close to call” rather than “fine”.

The actual limits

Field	Desktop	Mobile
Title	~580 px	~490 px
Description	~990 px	~1300 px

Two things in that table surprise people:

Mobile titles get less room than desktop. A narrower screen means a shorter headline. If your traffic is mostly phones, write to the mobile limit, not the desktop one — check both with the toggle.
Mobile descriptions get more room. Google wraps mobile snippets over more lines, so a description that gets clipped on desktop may well survive intact on a phone.

These are Google's practical limits, not published guarantees — Google rewrites titles and descriptions whenever it feels like it, and no rule survives that. What you control is whether the thing you wrote can be shown in full. Make it fit, and the choice is at least available.

Using the preview

Under How you appear in search you get a Google-style snippet built from your real audited pages, plus two controls:

Desktop / mobile toggle — redraws the snippet at that device's width and font size, and re-measures both meters against that device's limits.
Page picker — every page from the audit, homepage first. Swap between them to check your money pages, not just the front door.

Below the snippet, two pixel meters — one for the title, one for the description. They're colour-coded:

Green — comfortably inside the limit. Nothing to do.
Amber — within 10% of being cut. Trim a word.
Red — over the limit and being truncated, or missing entirely. A missing title shows in red in the snippet itself, because that's roughly how it looks to a searcher: broken.

// THE HIGHEST-VALUE FIVE MINUTES ON THIS PAGE

Open your top three pages in the picker and read the snippet out loud as if you were a stranger deciding whether to click. If it's cut off mid-word, or it's your brand name repeated twice, that's the click you're losing — and no amount of ranking better will fix it. If your Traffic tab shows impressions rising while clicks stay flat, this is where you look.

The preview needs the per-page data from an audit. If you're looking at an old report and the section is locked, re-run the audit and it fills in. Run one →

The heading tree

On-page analysis sits directly below, with the same page picker. The left-hand panel draws your headings as an indented outline — H1, H2, H3 — in the order they appear in your HTML, with the actual text.

Two things get flagged in red:

A skipped level. An H1 followed straight by an H3 is a broken outline — the H3 is claiming to be a sub-point of a section that doesn't exist. It's also flagged if your first heading on the page isn't an H1 at all.
No H1, or more than one. A banner at the top of the tree. Zero H1s means the page never says what it's about; several means it says three different things with equal confidence.

Read the outline as prose. If you can't tell what the page is about from the headings alone, neither can a search engine — and neither can an AI assistant, which is reading your headings to decide whether you answer the question.

Alt text and links

Two panels on the right:

Alt coverage — a donut showing what proportion of the images on this page carry an alt attribute. It turns green at 90% and up, amber from 60%, red below. A page with no images shows a dash, not a failure.
Links — how many internal and external links the page has. Fewer than three internal links gets a warning: a page nothing links to is a page search engines struggle to find and rank, no matter how good it is.

Both of these are scored checks, so what you see here is exactly what's driving those cards on the fix board. The full check list →

Length meters and the checklist

Under the link bars, two more meters — this time in characters, not pixels, with the ideal band shaded green:

Title — the shaded band is 30–60 characters.
Description — the shaded band is 70–155 characters.

These are the bands your score is graded against, which is why they're in characters — the score's grading rules are character-based even though the truncation rules are pixel-based. Use the character meter to satisfy the audit, and the pixel meter above to satisfy Google. When the two disagree, the pixel meter is the one your customers see.

Finally, the on-page checklist — eight chips, green for pass:

Single H1 · Canonical URL · Mobile viewport · Structured data — the structural four.
Social title · Social image — the Open Graph tags that decide how your link looks when someone shares it.
Indexable — this page is not carrying a noindex. If this one is red, fix it before anything else on the page.
Word count — green at 300 words and up, amber from 150.

Still stuck?

Contact support