How to use the character counter
- Type or paste your text. Counts update as you type.
- Read the character count with and without spaces, plus words and lines.
- Watch the platform limit bars on the right; they turn amber near a limit and red when you're over it.
- Trim your text until every bar you care about is within range, then copy it.
Features
- Characters with and without spaces, words and lines
- Progress bars for X posts, SMS, meta titles and descriptions, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube titles
- Counts emoji and combined characters the way platforms do (by Unicode code point)
- Instant, private and free
Why character counts vary between platforms
Most platforms count Unicode code points, which is what this tool does, so an emoji counts as one character. X is a notable exception: it counts many East Asian characters as two and shortens every URL to 23 characters regardless of length. SMS is another: a message with only basic Latin characters fits 160 per segment, but a single emoji or curly quote switches the message to UCS-2 encoding and the limit drops to 70.
Search snippet lengths
Google doesn't enforce a character limit on titles and descriptions; it truncates by pixel width. The commonly used guidelines of about 60 characters for titles and 155–160 for descriptions keep most text from being cut off on desktop. Mobile shows a little more of the description and a little less of the title.