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SERP Preview Tool

Preview how your title and description will look in Google search results, measured in real pixels. See exactly where the snippet gets truncated before you publish.

This renders your snippet with the same font stack and sizing Google uses on desktop, then measures it with a canvas. Instead of guessing from a character count, you see the actual pixel width and get told where the cut lands.

How to use it

  1. Type your title, URL and description.
  2. Read the rendered preview — the overflowing part is shown greyed out, exactly as Google would drop it.
  3. Shorten until the width bar sits in the green zone.

Character counts lie, pixels do not

Two descriptions can both be 150 characters and behave completely differently. One is built from narrow letters like i, l and t; the other is full of m, w and capitals. Google measures the rendered result, so the wide one gets truncated well before the narrow one does.

That is why this tool renders text in the real font and measures it rather than counting characters. If you have ever shipped a description that looked fine in your CMS and appeared chopped in search, width was the reason.

Google rewrites snippets anyway — plan for it

Google frequently replaces your meta description with a sentence pulled from the page body when it judges that sentence to match the query better. This is normal and not a penalty.

The practical response is to write a description that is good enough to keep, and to make sure the opening sentence of the page would also work if it gets pulled. You cannot force Google to use your text; you can only remove its reason to substitute.

What this tool deliberately does not do

It does not check your live snippet. Seeing what Google actually shows for a query requires running a search, which means a server-side request — and any browser-based tool claiming to do it is sending your query through someone else's infrastructure.

It also does not model the layouts that sit on top of the plain result: sitelinks, FAQ accordions, review stars, video thumbnails. Those change the available width substantially, and a preview that guessed at them would be wrong more often than it was right.

The value here is narrower and more practical: knowing, before you publish, whether the title and description you wrote fit in the space Google actually gives you.

Questions

What width does Google actually allow?

Desktop results render the title at roughly 20px and the description at 14px, with a container around 600px wide. Mobile is narrower. This tool uses the desktop value, which is the more forgiving of the two.

Why does my live snippet differ from this preview?

Because Google may rewrite the description from page content, add sitelinks, or show a featured-snippet layout. The preview shows the default single-result layout with your own text.

Can I preview rich results here?

Not yet. Structured-data driven layouts (FAQ, HowTo, product) render differently and are out of scope for this preview.

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