Meta Tag Analysis

Meta tag checker: what the analysis actually reads

Paste a URL and the checker downloads the HTML exactly as the server returns it, following redirects, then parses everything in <head> plus the H1–H6 outline. JavaScript is not executed. If your title and meta description are injected client-side by React or Vue, you will see what the raw source contains. That is worth knowing, because the raw source is the first thing a crawler receives.

The score is built from 14 equally weighted checks, roughly 7 points each:

Meta keywords, robots, hreflang, Twitter Cards and JSON-LD are listed for reference but do not affect the score. A score of 100 does not guarantee a good snippet: a tag can have the right length and still miss the query. The score finds gaps. Whether the copy is any good is still your call.

Checking title and meta description length: characters vs pixels

The checker counts characters, while Google truncates by rendered width. On desktop a title line fits roughly 600 pixels, and Google publishes no official limit. Treat 60 characters as a guideline. A title full of narrow letters (i, l, t, r) can run to 65 characters, while one with capitals and wide letters (W, M) may be cut at 50. A practical rule: put the main query and the point of the page in the first 40–45 characters, and the brand name at the end so that is what gets cut.

Meta descriptions have no fixed length at all. Google shows as much as it finds useful, typically around 150–160 characters on desktop and less on mobile. The preview in the report cuts the title at 70 characters and the description at 160. It is a quick estimate, not a pixel-exact copy of the results page. For a mobile view use the SERP snippet preview.

Why Google rewrites your title and description

Since the 2021 update Google generates title links itself more often. By its own figures the original <title> is used about 87% of the time. The usual triggers:

• Boilerplate titles. "Buy | Store" on a hundred product pages gives Google no way to tell them apart, so it falls back to the H1 or anchor text.
• Keyword stuffing. "Cheap shoes, buy shoes, shoes online, shoes sale".
• Stale information. "2024 prices" on a page updated in 2026.
• Mismatch with the H1. The title promises one thing and the main heading says another.
• Overlong or near-empty titles, such as just the brand name or "Home".

Descriptions are replaced even more often, and that is by design: Google picks whichever passage best answers the specific query. Your own description wins more often when it is unique to the page, echoes the query wording and carries specifics such as price, turnaround, quantity or audience. A description repeated across the site is almost always ignored. Google's rules are in its title link documentation.

Bad vs better

Open Graph and Twitter Cards: how links look when shared

Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, WhatsApp and Telegram build link cards from Open Graph tags. A minimal set:

<meta property="og:title" content="Same-day iPhone repair">
<meta property="og:description" content="Genuine parts, 6-month warranty">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og/repair.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/iphone-repair/">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

Use a 1200×630 image with an absolute https URL. Without twitter: tags, X generally falls back to the Open Graph title, description and image, so twitter:card alone is usually enough. Platforms cache cards. After a change, refresh them with Facebook's Sharing Debugger or LinkedIn's Post Inspector. To see the card across networks, use the OG Debugger.

Meta description audit: the problems the report surfaces most often

• noindex in the Robots row. Usually a leftover from staging, or WordPress's "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box. The page will drop out of search however good its title is.
• Canonical pointing elsewhere. For example, every paginated page canonicalises to page one, or the canonical points to the http version. Google may treat the page you checked as a duplicate.
• Two H1s. The logo in the header is wrapped in <h1> and the article title is a second one. Keep H1 for the main heading only.
• No viewport. On a phone the page renders as a shrunken desktop layout, and Google indexes the mobile version.
• Text only in og:description. The social description is filled in but the regular meta name="description" is empty. They are separate tags and you need both.

You can check meta tags without any tool: Ctrl+U (or Cmd+Option+U) shows the source, and curl -s https://example.com/ | grep -i "<title\|description" does the same from a terminal. The checker simply puts everything in one table and counts lengths for you.

Fixing meta tags in WordPress, Shopify and custom builds

• WordPress + Yoast SEO: in the post editor, the Yoast panel has "SEO title" and "Meta description". The default template %%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%% lives under Search Appearance. Rank Math works the same way. If the title appears twice, check that the theme does not print its own <title>. A well-behaved theme uses add_theme_support('title-tag').
• Shopify: each product, collection and page has a "Search engine listing" section at the bottom of the editor where you set the page title and meta description. The Open Graph image comes from the theme settings or the featured image.
• Custom CMS: titles and descriptions are generated in templates from record fields. Always define a fallback for empty fields, or you will end up with hundreds of pages sharing one tag.

This tool checks one page, but template mistakes repeat across hundreds of URLs. To find duplicate and missing tags site-wide, run the full technical site audit. The article on meta issues in the audit report explains how to read those findings.