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Why every other tool gets this wrong

Search for a title tag checker and you will be told the limit is 60 characters, or 55, or 70 depending on who wrote the page. All of those numbers are wrong in the same way: Google does not count characters.

A result is text laid out in a box of a fixed width. The browser fits what it can and cuts the rest. So a title made of narrow letters survives at 70 characters while one full of capitals and Ws is cut at 52. Counting characters tells you roughly what will happen most of the time, which is exactly the kind of advice that fails on the title you actually wrote.

This tool lays your text out in the typeface and sizes a result renders in, inside the widths it renders into, and cuts it where a browser would. The meters show pixels used against pixels available, because that is the unit the decision is made in.

Treat the numbers as a strong signal, not a specification

Google has never published these widths. They have moved before and they will move again, they differ between desktop and phone, and a result carrying sitelinks, a date or a product price behaves differently again.

What does not move is the principle. If your title is comfortably inside the box it will survive whatever the exact number turns out to be this quarter. If it is three pixels under the line, you are relying on a measurement nobody guarantees.

Google will often rewrite your description anyway

This surprises people and then annoys them, so it is worth being plain about. Your meta description is a suggestion. Google uses it when it thinks it is the best summary for that particular search, and writes its own from the page when it does not.

Write one anyway, for two reasons. When it is used, yours is better than the sentence an algorithm would have lifted from your third paragraph. And when it is not used, the thing Google writes instead comes from your page, so a page that answers the question clearly gets a better rewritten snippet than one that buries it.

Titles are rewritten less often, and usually for a reason you can fix: a title that does not match what the page is about, or one so stuffed with keywords that no sentence survives in it.

What a good title actually does

It is the one line of your page that appears in the result, next to nine competitors, and its job is to make a specific person think that is the one.

Put the thing first. The first few words survive every truncation. Your business name does not need to be first and often does not need to be there at all on a deep page.

Say the place if the place matters. For a local service it matters. For an article it usually does not.

Write one per page. Two pages with the same title are two pages telling Google they are the same page.

Do not repeat a word. If a word appears twice you have spent room that was worth more than the repetition, and it reads like it was written for a machine. It was.

And the URL underneath

Results show a breadcrumb trail rather than the raw address now, so deep folder structures cost you more than long file names. A URL with four nested folders gets abbreviated into something nobody can read. One with a short path and a descriptive last segment survives intact.

None of this is worth restructuring a working site over. It is worth knowing the next time you are deciding where a new page goes.