Character Counter: Character and Word Count

A character counter tells you how long a piece of text is, measured in characters and words. This one counts text the way it appears on screen. Every letter, digit, space, punctuation mark and line break is one character, and so is an emoji, a flag or a letter with an accent. Spaces are included because the ad platforms in the limits list count them too, so the number you see is the character count with spaces. The same box also works as a simple word counter.

The result panel checks the same count against common limits: 30 characters for a Google Ads headline, 90 for a description and 280 for a post on X. For a title tag it uses a working length of 60 characters, and for a meta description 155. The Meta row, 125 characters of primary text, is a rough guide for keeping the opening of an ad visible. Some of these are hard limits a platform enforces and others are approximations, and the table below separates the two.

Character counts matter most where space is fixed and the text is short: an ad headline, a push notification, a title in search results. In those places a few characters decide whether the key word fits. A word count is more useful for longer text, such as an email intro or a product description. There, readability depends on overall length more than on any single limit.

The table lists the limits this character counter checks against, what kind of limit each one is and what happens above it. A hard limit means the platform won't accept more characters. A guideline means longer text is accepted but may be cut off when it is shown.

The Google Ads numbers come from Google's own documentation. It says responsive search ad headlines support up to 30 characters and descriptions up to 90 (Google Ads Help: About responsive search ads). Title tag length and meta description length are only working targets. Google states there is no limit on how long a title element or a meta description can be. It truncates both in search results to fit the device width (Google Search Central: Title links, Control your snippets). For Meta, check the recommended text length for your placement in Meta's Ads Guide.

The same text can show a different number here and on the platform where you publish it. The difference comes from one of these:

• Emoji: the total above counts an emoji as 1, while X counts every emoji as 2. The X row in the list therefore shows the length by X's own rule (X developer docs: Counting characters).

• Links on X: X shortens every link and counts it as 23 characters, whatever its real length. The X row in the list uses X's own counting library, so it also counts a bare domain such as example.com as a 23-character link.

• Double-width scripts: Google Ads counts each Chinese, Japanese or Korean character as 2. Accented letters such as é or ü count as 1 like any other letter.

• Pixel width: Google truncates title links and snippets by the space they take on screen. A title full of wide letters such as W and M is cut off sooner than one of the same length with narrow letters.

• Hidden characters: trailing spaces and extra line breaks pasted from a document count too, and add characters you can't see.

When a line is just over a limit, cut filler words first and keep the word people search for near the start. For ads, it also helps to write two or three variants and test them against each other. The A/B test significance calculator shows whether the difference in clicks between them is more than chance.