Why titles and descriptions get cut off

Everybody has seen a search result end in an ellipsis mid-sentence, and everybody has been told a character limit that would have prevented it. The character limit is a rule of thumb standing in for something else, and knowing what it stands in for changes how you write the line.

The actual mechanism

A search result is a web page. The title is a link in a container of a certain width, and the description sits in a block underneath with a line limit. When the text does not fit the box, it is cut and an ellipsis is appended. That is all that is happening. There is no editorial decision and no penalty — it is text overflowing a container, the same thing your own site does to a long product name in a narrow card.

So the limit is a width, measured in pixels of rendered text, not a count of characters. Characters are only a proxy for width, and a poor one, because characters are not the same size. In the proportional fonts these results are set in, an i or an l or a t occupies a fraction of the space of an M or a W. A capital letter is wider than its lowercase form, so a Title In Headline Case Costs More Than the same words in sentence case. Digits, em dashes and spaces all have their own widths.

The practical consequence: two titles of identical length can behave completely differently. "Minimalist illustration tips" and "WOMEN'S WORKWEAR CATALOGUE" have the same character count and nowhere near the same width. One fits; one does not.

Why nobody can give you the number

The width of the container depends on the device and the layout. A phone in portrait is narrower than a desktop browser. The font, the font size and the layout are all the search engine's, they are changed from time to time without announcement, and the same result can be presented differently in different places and contexts. Any single figure — characters or pixels — is a snapshot of one surface at one moment, quietly presented as a law.

Which is why the honest advice is to check rather than to memorise, and to leave yourself margin instead of aiming at the edge.

What the preview tool actually reports

Be clear about what you are getting. The SERP Snippet Preview takes a title, a URL and a description and reports two things: the character count of the title and the character count of the description, each with a flag. It marks a title over sixty characters and a description over one hundred and sixty as likely to truncate, and notes a description under seventy as a little short. It does not measure pixels, and it does not draw a typographically exact mock of a result.

Those thresholds are the conventional rules of thumb, chosen because they are roughly where average-width text stops fitting an average-width container. Treat the flags as what they are: a rough warning that you are in the zone where a cut becomes likely, on text of ordinary width. If your title is shouting in capitals, you will be cut earlier than the count suggests. If it is all narrow letters, later.

Front-loading is the technique that survives all of this

If you cannot know exactly where the cut falls, write so that the cut does not matter. Put the words that identify the page at the front of the line, and put the words that could be dropped without loss at the back.

That means the specific thing first and the generic frame last. "Compound interest calculator" carries the page; "— free online tool from Example" does not, and is precisely what should be sitting in the part that might disappear. It means the brand name at the end rather than the start, unless the brand is the reason somebody clicks. It means not opening three titles on your site with the same six words, because the distinguishing word then arrives after the point where a reader has stopped reading.

The same applies to the description. The first sentence should stand alone and be worth the click, because it may be all that shows. Anything you were saving for the end may not be shown at all — and remember that the description is a candidate for that grey line rather than a guarantee of it, since a passage from the page itself can be shown instead when it matches the query more directly.

A short routine

1. Write the title for the person deciding whether to click, distinctive words first.
2. Paste it into the preview and look at the flag. Over the mark, tighten; well under, you have room.
3. Read only the first half of your own title and ask whether it still identifies the page. If not, reorder.
4. Do the same for the description, and make the first sentence complete.
5. Skip capitals used for emphasis. They cost width and buy nothing.

None of this changes where a page is placed. It changes whether the line a reader sees makes sense when it has been cut in half, which is a thing you control completely.