Meta Description Length 2026: Why Google Measures Pixels, Not Characters

The limit is a width, not a number

Almost every guide states that a meta description should be 155 or 160 characters. That figure is a useful approximation, but it is not the rule Google applies. Google truncates snippets by rendered pixel width — roughly 920 pixels on desktop and 680 on mobile — which means the number of characters that fit depends on which characters they are.

The practical consequence is that two descriptions of exactly 158 characters can behave differently: one displays in full, the other is cut off. A description built from wide letters such as m and w occupies more space than one built from i, l and t, even at identical character counts.

Why 155 characters is still a reasonable target

Pixel measurement is impractical to work with while writing, and for ordinary English prose the relationship between characters and width is stable enough that 155 characters serves as a dependable proxy. Writing to that target and treating anything past it as expendable produces descriptions that survive truncation in the great majority of cases.

Mobile is the constraint worth designing for. At roughly 115–130 characters, mobile truncation is considerably tighter than desktop, and mobile accounts for the majority of search traffic for most sites. A description whose essential meaning is complete by 120 characters works everywhere.

Japanese and other full-width scripts

Full-width characters occupy approximately twice the horizontal space of Latin characters, so the same pixel budget holds far fewer of them. For Japanese, Chinese and Korean descriptions, the working target is roughly 70 to 80 characters on desktop and around 50 on mobile.

This is a display-width effect rather than a counting rule. Google is not weighting these characters the way X does; they simply take up more room. The distinction matters when reading advice written for English-language sites, which will consistently overstate how much text fits.

What meta descriptions do and do not affect

Meta descriptions have not been a direct ranking signal for many years. Their function is entirely to influence whether someone clicks a result that already ranks. This makes them worth writing carefully but not worth optimising for keyword density.

• •Google rewrites descriptions for a substantial share of queries, generating a snippet from page content when it judges that more relevant than the supplied text.
• •A rewritten snippet is not a penalty and does not indicate a problem with the description.
• •Keywords matching the query are shown in bold, which is a legitimate reason to include the terms a page is targeting.
• •Duplicate descriptions across many pages reduce their usefulness, since the snippet no longer distinguishes one result from another.
• •Omitting the description entirely leaves Google to generate one, which is often serviceable but rarely as persuasive as a written one.

Writing a description that earns the click

• •State what the page contains, not what the page is about — specificity outperforms summary.
• •Include the primary query terms naturally so they appear in bold in the result.
• •Complete the essential meaning within 120 characters so it survives mobile truncation.
• •Avoid opening with the site name, which is already displayed above the snippet.
• •Write a distinct description for every page that matters; templated descriptions read as templated.

PostLen includes a meta description counter set to 160 characters, alongside counters for X, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube and TikTok. Because the same draft is measured against every target at once, a description written for search can be checked against social limits in the same pass.

Frequently asked questions