SERP snippet preview tool

What a SERP snippet is

SERP stands for search engine results page: the list Google shows after someone searches. Each entry on it is a snippet. It has four parts: your site name with a small icon, the page address shown as a breadcrumb trail (example.com › blog › post), the blue clickable title, and two or so lines of description underneath.

You write two of those parts yourself. The title comes from the page's <title> tag and the description from its meta description tag. The site name and breadcrumb come from your domain, the page address and, where you've added it, your structured data. Together they're the only thing a searcher sees before deciding whether your page is worth a click, which is why it pays to look at them before you publish rather than after.

Why the preview measures pixels, not characters

Google doesn't stop a title at a set number of characters. It stops when the text runs out of room. A title full of narrow letters like i, l and t fits far more characters than one full of W, M and capitals. That's why two 60-character titles can behave completely differently: one shows in full, the other ends in "...".

This preview draws your text with Arial at the sizes Google uses and measures it in your browser. On desktop a title is cut at about 600 pixels. A description is cut at about 920 pixels on desktop and about 680 on mobile. Google doesn't publish these numbers. They're the widths commonly observed in real results, so treat a result right at the limit as a coin toss, not a guarantee.

Each field gets a bar. Green means it fits with room to spare, amber means it's close enough that a bold word or a small change could tip it over, and red means Google would cut it. Under each bar you'll see the exact text Google would show when it does.

Desktop and mobile are cut differently

Phones are narrower, so Google wraps text onto more lines there. Titles usually get a second line on mobile, which means the desktop width is normally the stricter limit for a title. Descriptions go the other way: the mobile snippet shows less of your description, so a sentence that reads perfectly on desktop can stop halfway through on a phone.

The practical fix is the same for both. Put the words that matter first. If the first half of your description makes sense on its own, it doesn't matter much where a phone cuts the rest.

When Google shows something else

Google's documentation says it usually builds the result's title from your title tag, but it may use other text, such as the page's main heading, when the title is missing, vague, repeated across many pages, stuffed with keywords or doesn't match the page. For descriptions, Google says it uses the meta description when it describes the page better than other text on it, and otherwise picks a passage that matches the search. So the same page can show different descriptions for different searches.

You can't force Google to keep your version, but you can make it the obvious choice: a title that says what the page is, a description that answers the search in plain words, and neither one cut off mid-sentence. If Google keeps replacing them, that's a hint they don't match what people actually search for.

Getting the most from the preview

• Add your keyword. Google bolds the searched words in the description, and seeing where the bold lands shows whether the important part sits early enough.
• Set the site name. Google picks it from your home page, and its documentation recommends WebSite structured data with your preferred name. If yours shows the bare domain, that's why.
• Check the breadcrumb. A short, readable address (/blog/price-cakes) tells searchers more than /p?id=4821.
• Load a live page to see what it shows today, then edit the fields to try out a better version side by side with the old one.

This tool shows how a snippet looks. If you want a score for your title and description, with the keyword placement, reason-to-click and duplicate checks, use the meta description and title checker linked below.