Is my page title too long or too short?
Your page title has a sweet spot. Too long and a search result cuts it off part way through; too short and it says too little about the page. We measure it, show you where it lands, and leave it out of your score, because a title of any length can still be read by a machine.
What it actually is
The title is the line in a browser tab and the headline of a search result. Google sets no limit on how long a title may be, but it trims the line it shows to fit the width of the screen. So we measure how wide your title would render rather than counting its letters: a run of wide capitals fills the line sooner than narrow letters do, and Chinese, Japanese or Korean titles are judged on their real width.
Why it matters
A title is often the first and only thing a person reads about your page before choosing it. When the end is cut off, the part that gets lost is usually the part that made it specific, like the product, the place or your brand. A very short title has the opposite problem: it shows in full and still does not say enough to stand out.
What good looks like
A title that fits in the space a search result gives it and still names the page precisely: what the page is about first, your brand after, nothing padded and nothing trailing off into an ellipsis.
Being honest about it
This is a presentation detail, and it does not move your score. Whether a title exists and says what the page is matters to a machine, and that is a separate check that does count. Length only decides how much of it a person sees in a results list. Our lower bound is also a judgement of our own: a short title is never truncated, and some short titles are exactly right for their page.
Where most sites go wrong
Long titles usually come from templates that stack the page name, the section, the category and the site name with separators between them. Short ones are the bare page name, "Home" or "Services", left as the CMS created it.
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