Why two 60-character titles truncate differently in search
A demonstration that search snippets are cut by rendered pixel width, not character count — so a title full of wide letters truncates sooner than a same-length title of narrow ones.
SEO advice quotes title length in characters. But two titles of identical character count sometimes truncate at different points in search results. Why?
Method
This experiment measures rendered width rather than counting characters. I render candidate titles in a font metrically similar to the search results page and measure their width in pixels with a canvas, the same technique the SERP snippet preview tool uses.
I compare two 60-character titles: one built from wide characters (capital W and M, the letter m) and one from narrow characters (i, l, t, punctuation). Character count is held constant; only the character shapes differ.
You can reproduce this by pasting each title into the SERP snippet preview and comparing the reported pixel width against the practical desktop title limit.
Observations
The two titles have the same character count but very different pixel widths — the wide-character title can exceed the desktop title limit while the narrow one sits comfortably under it.
Because truncation is triggered by pixel width, the wide title is cut with characters to spare on the counter, while the narrow title survives past the nominal character 'limit'.
This is why a fixed character budget is only a proxy. It works because average text has an average width, but it breaks precisely for the titles most worth optimizing: brand names, capitalized phrases, and keyword-dense headlines.
Reproduce this with the related tool: /tools/serp-snippet-preview
Limitations
Pixel measurement here approximates the results page's font stack; the exact rendering differs slightly across operating systems, browsers, and languages.
Search engines also rewrite titles and change truncation behavior over time, so pixel width predicts truncation but does not guarantee what is displayed.
The demonstration covers desktop titles; mobile and meta-description truncation follow the same principle but different limits.
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