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Title and description: the lengths that pass every judge
Every analysis tool has its own thresholds, and they differ from one tool to the next. Yet there is a window where they all agree: a title between 30 and 60 characters, a description between 110 and 155. Four bounds, two upper and two lower, each with a reason to exist. Here is what they say, what you gain by holding them, and how to hold them when the page exists in several languages.
The four bounds, and where they come from
The common window is a measurable fact: it is the intersection of the thresholds used by the market's strictest judges. Ahrefs and Moz flag a title beyond 60 characters and a description beyond 155; Semrush and Ahrefs flag a title under 30 and a description under 110. Staying between 30 and 60, and between 110 and 155, satisfies all four checks at once. Our own site holds these bounds on every page, across its eight languages.
01 · Title
Up to 60 characters
This is the upper bound of the strictest judges: Ahrefs and Moz flag a title that exceeds it. Below it, the end of the sentence is still read in full — and it is almost always the end that carries the precision.
See it: Count the characters of the text contained in the <title> tag, including the brand suffix your template adds automatically. It is the total as served that counts: your sentence and the suffix combined.
Holding it: Write the substance first, the brand second. If the suffix is fourteen characters, your sentence has forty-six available: plenty of room to name the page precisely.
02 · Title
From 30 characters
Semrush and Ahrefs flag a title that is too short. The lower bound exists because you need room to differentiate: two or three words describe a category, whereas thirty characters describe a page.
See it: Line up your page titles and read them one after another, with the URLs hidden. The ones you immediately connect to their question are the right length; the others have characters to gain.
Holding it: Add what sets the page apart from the others: the precision, the scope, the case covered. A title gains from naming the exact subject rather than a general theme.
03 · Description
Up to 155 characters
Ahrefs and Moz report a longer description. The description acts on clicks rather than on ranking: it's the sentence that decides the visit, and everything that fits before the cut-off works for you.
See it: Count the full string, spaces and punctuation included. Typographic quotation marks, em dashes and escaped entities each count as one character.
Holding it: A description is a promise rather than a summary. One sentence saying what the reader will find fits the window comfortably; two sentences repeating the page overflow it.
04 · Description
From 110 characters
Semrush and Ahrefs report a shorter description. A thirty-character description takes up the same space as a full one and says three times less: the lower bound gives you that space back.
See it: Spot the pages whose description was generated from the title or from the first sentence of the text. Those are the ones that fall below the bound, almost always.
Holding it: One written description per page. When the catalogue is too large to write by hand, SEO Autopilot writes the descriptions from your real data.
What you gain by holding the window
A search engine rewrites a title it judges unsuitable. Holding the window therefore means keeping control of the sentence that represents you: the one you weighed is the one displayed. Outside the bounds, the page stays online, it stays indexed, and the engine substitutes a wording drawn from your text or your links.
Above the lower bound, you occupy all the space reserved for your page; below it, the engine leaves the title as is but that space stays half empty — the same loss, in another form. Either way, what's at stake is an opportunity to take, and it can be taken back in one line.
Holding the limits across several languages
That's where the limits are truly won, and it's our own story. Translation lengthens text: German by around 15%. A 55-character French title, perfect in its window, goes over the upper bound once translated — silently, on a page the French version tells you is fine. On 30 August 2026, 36 out-of-bounds lengths were sitting in production on the translated versions of our site, invisible from the French.
The lesson comes down to one rule: length must be checked in every language served, and that measurement is the one that counts. Since then, our publication guard puts a page online only once its title and description hold the limits in all eight of our languages: French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish. A page outside the window waits for its fix, and goes live again as soon as it fits.
In practice, write the French with some margin. Aiming for the middle of the window rather than its upper edge leaves German room to stretch while staying within the frame. That's the only discipline to keep upstream; the rest is checked at publication.
Measuring your titles and descriptions
The Checker reads your URL and returns the lengths served, free, in about ten seconds. Your site remains entirely yours: the reading is done remotely. The Audit SEO Records goes further: it reads your whole sitemap, page by page, and hands you a dated report. To fix things while leaving your template intact, SEO Records acts on the signals at the moment the page is served, from €199/year.