How long should a meta description be?

A safe target, and why there's no single hard limit.

Updated August 2026

The practical target most SEO writers use is 150–160 characters. That's short enough to display fully in a Google search result on most screens, without being so short that you're leaving useful space unused.

Why there's no exact cutoff

Search engines don't truncate meta descriptions based on a character count — they truncate based on pixel width. Google's search results have a fixed-width container for the snippet, and because different letters take up different amounts of horizontal space (a lowercase "i" is much narrower than an uppercase "W"), two descriptions with the same character count can wrap at different points. This is why you'll see slightly different "ideal length" numbers across different SEO tools — they're all approximating a pixel limit with a character count, and the approximation shifts depending on which letters you happen to use.

160 characters is a reasonably safe ceiling for most sentences in English. Descriptions heavy with wide capital letters may get cut off slightly earlier; descriptions in mostly lowercase, narrower characters can sometimes run a little longer before truncating.

What happens if you go over

Nothing breaks — your page won't be penalized for a long meta description. Search engines simply truncate the display, usually ending with an ellipsis (…), and in many cases will rewrite or pull a different snippet from your page content entirely if they judge it better matches the searcher's query. Writing a good, complete sentence within the limit still matters, because search engines do use your written description a meaningful portion of the time.

A few practical rules

• Front-load the most important information — assume it might get cut off, especially on mobile, where the visible snippet is often shorter than on desktop.
• Write a genuine, specific sentence about the page's content rather than a list of keywords; search engines have gotten better at recognizing and deprioritizing keyword-stuffed descriptions.
• Avoid duplicating the same meta description across multiple pages — each page should get its own.
• There's no minimum length requirement, but under ~70 characters usually means you're leaving useful space unused.

Other common length targets

You can check any of these against a live character count using CounterWord's counter, which includes built-in progress bars for meta title and meta description length as you type.