Meta Tag Checker
Paste HTML to extract and analyze all meta tags including title, description, OG tags, and more.
Updated July 11, 2026
100% Private & Secure
This tool runs in your browser.
Your data is never uploaded or stored.
Click "Check" to analyze meta tags...
How to use
- 1
Paste the HTML source of the page.
- 2
Click Check to analyze meta tags.
- 3
Review the results and suggestions.
When to use it
Auditing title and description length before publishing
Google truncates titles past roughly 60 characters and descriptions past roughly 155 characters (measured by pixel width, not strictly character count). Checking first prevents your carefully written copy from being cut off with an ellipsis in search results.
Verifying Open Graph and Twitter Card completeness
Missing og:image or twitter:card tags produce blank or generic previews when a link is shared on social platforms. The checker confirms every required social tag is present and valid.
Finding duplicate or missing canonical tags
A missing or conflicting rel="canonical" can split ranking signals across URL variants. The checker surfaces every canonical reference so you can confirm each page points at the right destination.
Spotting a missing viewport or charset declaration
Mobile-first indexing means a missing viewport meta breaks mobile rendering and can harm rankings. The checker flags absent fundamental tags that are easy to overlook in a custom template.
How it works
The tags that actually affect search
Of the dozens of meta tags in existence, only a handful move the SEO needle. Title remains the single most important on-page element — Google uses it as the primary headline in results and a strong relevance signal. Meta description does not directly affect ranking but heavily influences click-through rate, which indirectly does.
The Google Search Central snippet documentation is clear that descriptions are often rewritten by Google — but a well-written one still wins more often than it loses. The robots meta tag controls indexation and follow behavior at the page level, complementing (not replacing) robots.txt.
-
<title>— aim for under 60 characters; the hard limit is roughly 580–600 pixels of width -
<meta name="description">— target 70–155 characters; mobile truncates closer to 120 -
<meta name="robots">—index, followis the default; usenoindexto drop a page -
<link rel="canonical">— resolves duplicate URLs to a single canonical version
Character limits are really pixel limits
The "60 characters for title, 155 for description" guideline is a useful heuristic, but Google actually truncates by pixel width — roughly 600 px for titles and up to 920 px for desktop descriptions. This is why a title full of wide letters (W, M, uppercase) gets cut sooner than one full of narrow letters (i, l, lowercase).
There is no exact character count you can hit reliably; the only way to be sure is to preview against a real SERP width simulator. The checker surfaces both the character count and a rough truncation warning so you can judge.
Open Graph, Twitter Card, and the social layer
Beyond search, meta tags govern how links render when shared. The Open Graph protocol (defined at ogp.me) originated at Facebook and is now read by LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, and most messaging apps. Twitter extends it with its own twitter:* tags.
The minimum viable social set is og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, and og:type, plus twitter:card set to summary_large_image for the large-preview format. Missing any of these produces a plain-text link with no preview image.
<meta property="og:title" content="DevTidy — Free Developer Tools">
<meta property="og:description" content="Fast, private developer tools that run in your browser.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://devtidy.com/og/default.png">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://devtidy.com/">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">Common mistakes & edge cases
Title appears truncated in Google with an ellipsis
Titles are cut by pixel width (~600px), roughly 60 characters. Trim wide letters and uppercase characters first, or rewrite to convey the key phrase within the first 50 characters.
Social share shows no preview image
The og:image is missing, or the image URL is not absolute and publicly reachable. Use a 1200×630 px PNG/JPG on a public URL, and confirm it returns HTTP 200 to the crawler user agent.
Duplicate pages competing in search results
A missing or conflicting rel="canonical" lets URL variants (with/without trailing slash, query strings) index separately. Add a self-referencing canonical on every page pointing to its preferred URL.
A page is indexed despite a noindex intent
Check the robots meta tag value and make sure robots.txt is not Disallowing the page — if it is, Googlebot never fetches the page and never sees your noindex directive.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I check a URL directly?
References & further reading
Related reading
Structured data (JSON-LD) for tool sites
How JSON-LD unlocks rich results, the schema types a tool site needs (WebApplication, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList), and a working example.
noindex vs robots.txt vs canonical: when to use which
Three controls that look interchangeable and aren't. A decision table for keeping pages out of Google's index without breaking crawling.
Open Graph and Twitter Card preview debugging
Why link previews break, the OG tags and image dimensions that fix them, and the debugging workflow that catches problems before users do.