How long should a title tag be?

Google truncates titles by pixel width, which works out to roughly 50 to 60 characters on desktop. Put the words people search for first so they survive the cut.

How long should a meta description be?

About 120 to 160 characters. Google often rewrites descriptions, but a specific one that matches the query is more likely to be shown and clicked.

What does the canonical check mean?

The canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page. A canonical pointing to a different page tells Google to index that page instead, which is a common reason a page never ranks.

Why does a page show tags I cannot see in my CMS?

This checker reads the HTML your server sends, without running JavaScript. If your site sets tags with JavaScript after the page loads, crawlers that do not render JavaScript may never see them.

Free tools

Meta tag checker

Paste up to 10 page URLs. We fetch each one and show its title, meta description, canonical, robots tag, H1 and Open Graph title, with length warnings and duplicates across the pages.

What the checker flags

Missing titles and descriptions, and ones long enough to be cut off in results.
Descriptions short enough to be replaced by text Google picks itself.
Canonical tags that point to another page.
A noindex robots tag, which keeps the page out of search results entirely.
No H1, or more than one.
The same title or description used on several of the pages you checked.

Why these tags still matter for AI answers

AI search features in Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity retrieve pages from a search index before they write an answer, and the title, description and headings are part of how a page is matched to a question. A page that is canonicalised away or set to noindex cannot be retrieved at all. Check the crawler side with the AI crawler checker and read AEO vs GEO vs SEO for what changes beyond the tags.

Checking a whole site

Ten pages is enough to spot a template problem. To check every page, connect the site to XeoRank: the crawler reads each page, groups the problems by page type, and your AI assistant can fix titles and descriptions on WordPress through Yoast, Rank Math or All in One SEO after you approve them. Start with a free site analysis.

Questions

How long should a title tag be?: Google truncates titles by pixel width, which works out to roughly 50 to 60 characters on desktop. Put the words people search for first so they survive the cut.
How long should a meta description be?: About 120 to 160 characters. Google often rewrites descriptions, but a specific one that matches the query is more likely to be shown and clicked.
What does the canonical check mean?: The canonical tag tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page. A canonical pointing to a different page tells Google to index that page instead, which is a common reason a page never ranks.
Why does a page show tags I cannot see in my CMS?: This checker reads the HTML your server sends, without running JavaScript. If your site sets tags with JavaScript after the page loads, crawlers that do not render JavaScript may never see them.

More free tools

llms.txt generator

Reads your sitemap and page titles and drafts an llms.txt file you can edit and download.

Robots.txt generator

Build a robots.txt that allows AI search crawlers and blocks AI training crawlers, with a WordPress preset.

AI crawler checker

Shows which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and more.

Sitemap checker

Finds every sitemap a site declares, counts the URLs, checks lastmod dates and spot-checks that listed URLs return 200.

Redirect checker

Tests http, https, www and non-www versions of a site and shows every redirect hop, so you can see if they all land on one URL.

Schema markup generator

Build JSON-LD for Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQ, Product and Article pages, ready to paste into your site.

Keyword density checker

Word count and the most repeated words and phrases in your text, plus how often a target keyword appears. Runs in your browser.

SERP snippet preview

See how your title and meta description may look in Google on desktop and mobile, and where they get cut off.

Open Graph checker

og:title, og:description, og:image and twitter:card tags for up to 5 pages, with a preview of the shared link card.

H1 checker

The H1 heading of up to 10 pages, flagging pages with none or more than one.

Canonical tag checker

Whether each page's canonical points to itself, is missing, or tells Google to index a different URL.

Hreflang checker

Hreflang tags, language and region codes, x-default and return links between language versions.

Core Web Vitals checker

Real-user LCP, INP and CLS from the Chrome UX Report plus a Lighthouse lab test, on mobile or desktop.