Here’s a small tool I’ve built: a SERP preview. It’s at /serp-preview/, and it does one narrow, useful thing. It shows you how your page title and meta description will actually appear in Google’s results, and where they’ll get cut off.
It exists because of a mistake I see constantly, and have made myself. People write titles and descriptions to a character count, “keep the title under sixty characters”, that sort of rule of thumb. But Google doesn’t truncate by characters, it truncates by pixels. A title made of narrow letters can run well past sixty characters and still fit; a title full of wide ones, capital Ms and Ws, gets cut off before you reach the limit you were told to aim for. The character count is only ever a rough stand-in for the thing that actually decides it.
So rather than counting characters and hoping, you paste your title and description in and see the thing itself: the real rendered width, and the little “…” where Google runs out of room. If your call to action or your brand name is sitting in the part that gets cut, you find that out before it goes live rather than after.
It only does the one thing. It won’t write your titles or tell you whether they’re any good, it just shows you what Google will show, which is the bit people get wrong most often. Agency work means writing a lot of these, for a lot of pages, and eyeballing them in a spreadsheet was never going to catch the truncations reliably.
It took an afternoon to build, and it has already saved me that afternoon back several times over, mostly in titles I’d otherwise have shipped with the important half missing.
