Meta tag checker and SERP preview

The title is usually the blue headline of your search result, and the default headline when someone shares the link. Google's guidance is short: give every page a title, make it descriptive and concise, avoid keyword stuffing and repeated boilerplate, and brand it concisely with a separator such as a hyphen or colon.

Google sets no limit on title length. It truncates the displayed title to fit the device width. This checker flags titles over 60 or under 10 characters, the same thresholds the IndexZero site audit uses. Those are rules of thumb, not Google limits. The preview measures the text in pixels at around 600px, which is closer to how the cut happens than a character count.

• Put the words that describe the page first, so they survive truncation.
• Make each page's title different. Titles repeated across pages are one of the reasons Google replaces them.
• Keep the brand short and at the end, unless the brand is what people search for.

Google builds snippets mainly from the page content, and uses the meta description when it describes the page more accurately. So the description is a candidate for your snippet, not a guarantee. Google also sets no length limit here; it truncates to fit the device width. The checker uses the audit's range of 70 to 160 characters.

• Describe this specific page, and write a different description for each page.
• Include the facts a searcher would want at a glance: price, author, date, location, what the page lets them do.
• On large sites built from a database, generating descriptions from those fields is fine, and Google encourages it.
• A nosnippet directive in the robots meta tag stops Google showing a snippet at all. The checker reports it.

Google generates title links from several sources: the <title> element, the main visible heading, other headings, og:title, prominent text on the page, anchor text of links pointing to the page, and WebSite structured data. Its title link documentation lists what makes it pick something other than your title.

• The title is missing, or is the same boilerplate on many pages.
• The title is stuffed with keywords.
• The title is out of date, such as last year's date on a page that has been updated.
• The title doesn't match what the page is about.
• The page has several headings of equal visual weight, so the main title is unclear.
• The title is in a different language or script from the page content.

Snippets change for a similar reason: Google may pick text from the page that answers the specific search better than your description does. That is why the preview on this page is labelled approximate. It shows what your tags ask for, not what Google will choose.

Open Graph tags control the card that appears when someone shares your link in a chat app or social feed. Facebook lists five basic tags: og:url (the canonical URL, without session or tracking parameters), og:title, og:description, og:image and og:type. This checker reports any of those five that are missing.

• og:image matters most, since a share without an image is a small text link. Facebook recommends at least 1200x630 pixels, says to use no less than 600x315, sets 200x200 as the smallest allowed size, and caps the file at 8 MB.
• Keep the image close to a 1.91:1 aspect ratio so Facebook shows it without cropping. 1200x630 is that ratio.
• Declare og:image:width and og:image:height. Facebook says this helps the image load properly the first time the link is shared.
• Use the full URL, starting with https://, for og:image and og:url.

Twitter tags do the same job on X. X's card markup uses the name attribute where Open Graph uses property, but its parser also reads property, and when a twitter: tag is missing it falls back to the Open Graph equivalent. In practice you need twitter:card to choose the card type (summary_large_image for a large image, summary for a small one), and twitter:title, twitter:description and twitter:image only when you want X to show something different from your Open Graph tags.

It fetches the page once from IndexZero's server with the IndexZero-Audit user agent, reads the head without running JavaScript, and fetches og:image once to confirm it loads and is served as an image. Tags that a site adds with JavaScript after load will not appear here. Image dimensions are the ones the page declares; the checker does not download the image to measure it.

Title, meta description, noindex and canonical findings use the same thresholds and wording as the IndexZero site audit. The API behind the page is GET /api/tools/meta-tags?url=, and it returns the same findings as JSON.