Search snippet preview

How to use it

1. 1Enter the address you want to checkType or paste it into the field marked "Address to check", including the https:// at the front. Use a page whose search listing you are trying to improve.
2. 2Press Check and wait a few secondsThe request runs from our server rather than from your browser, so your cache, your extensions and your login session cannot affect the answer. That is the point of it: you are seeing what an anonymous visitor sees.
3. 3Look at where the text stopsThe preview shows the title and description as they would be cut off on desktop and on mobile. The point is not to fill the space — it is to make sure the part that survives the cut still says the important thing.
4. 4Read it as a stranger scanning ten resultsThe preview is deliberately plain, because that is how it appears in a list of competitors. If your line only makes sense to somebody who already knows your brand, it is doing less work than it could.
5. 5Expect the real snippet to differSearch engines frequently rewrite descriptions to match the query. This shows what you have offered them, not what they will print — no tool can show the second, and one claiming to is inventing it.
6. 6Share or keep the result within 24 hoursThe result has its own link you can send to whoever needs to act on it. It is deleted 24 hours after the check ran, so save anything you need to keep — and re-run the check after a change rather than trusting an old link.

About this tool

This tool shows how a page is likely to appear in a search result: the title, the breadcrumb-style address and the description, cut where the width runs out, on desktop and on mobile.

Search results truncate on pixel width rather than on character count, which is why advice phrased as "keep it under 60 characters" is unreliable — sixty capital letters take far more room than sixty lowercase ones. The preview cuts where the measurement says it will.

Understanding the result

The desktop and mobile previews differ because the mobile column is narrower. A title that fits comfortably on a laptop can lose its last few words on a phone, which is where most searches happen.

A title that will be shortened is not a fault to fix by trimming words arbitrarily. Put what matters most at the front — that part survives.

No meta description is not an error. Google composes one from the page when there is none. What you lose is control of the wording under your link.

Example

https://example.com/

Desktop: "Example Domain" fits (138px of ~580px)
Mobile: fits
No meta description declared — Google will compose one from the page

Limitations

• Google rewrites titles in a large share of results, using the H1, the site name or link text instead of what you wrote. This is a rehearsal, not a prediction.
• Pixel widths come from an approximate per-character table. The real width depends on the font Google serves that day, which changes.
• Real results carry things this preview does not model: site names, dates, sitelinks, favicons and rich-result decorations, all of which change how much room the text gets.
• Read from the raw HTML, so a title set by JavaScript after load is not what appears here — which is also what a non-rendering crawler sees.

Questions