Free tool
How Google sees you.
The first thing a customer sees isn't your website: it's your Google result, and the card that shows up when someone sends your link on WhatsApp. Drop your address in and look at both the way they do.
What you are looking at
A result is three pieces.
What shows up on Google isn't entirely Google's choice: you write three of the four pieces, and almost nobody writes them. Here they are, as the person searching for you sees them.
The title
It is the blue link and it is what decides the click. It comes from your page's
<title>tag, though Google reserves the right to rewrite it when it thinks yours doesn't match the query — which it does roughly 60 % of the time when the title is generic or stuffed. About 60 characters fit before the cut.The address
Google no longer shows the whole URL: it shows the site name and the path as breadcrumbs. A path you can read (“/services/online-shop”) says what the page is about before you read anything; one made of numbers says nothing and takes the same room.
The description
The two grey lines. They come from your meta description and they don't move your position by a single place — they change how many people click while you sit in the same place, which as far as visits go is the same thing. About 160 characters fit. If you don't write one, Google clips a piece of the page, and the piece it picks is rarely the good one.
The card that travels on WhatsApp
When someone sends your link on WhatsApp, LinkedIn or Slack, what they see is not your website: it is the card your Open Graph tags declare. With no image declared, your site travels as a bare link, and a bare link gets opened far less than a card with a picture.
What people ask us
How your site looks, and why.
- Why doesn't Google use the title I wrote?
- Because it rewrites it when it believes its own fits the query better. The usual reasons are a title repeated across half the site, one stuffed with keywords separated by pipes, one that is too long, or one containing nothing the person actually typed. The fix isn't to fight it: it is to write the title Google would have written.
- How long can the title be?
- About 60 characters. The real cut goes by pixel width rather than letters — an “m” takes three times the room of an “i” — but 60 is the count everyone works with and it doesn't miss by much. Put what matters first: if it gets cut, let it cut the part you didn't need.
- And the description?
- About 160 characters. Below 110 Google usually discards it and writes its own, so a two-word description is the same as no description. And don't repeat it across pages: two identical descriptions tell Google the two pages are the same page.
- Does changing the description move me up?
- No. The meta description is not a ranking factor and Google has said so in writing. What it changes is the share of people who click while seeing you in the same spot. Being ninth and getting clicked by 3 % instead of 0.4 % multiplies your visits by seven without moving a single place.
- Why does my site show up with no picture on WhatsApp?
- Because it declares no social image, or the one it declares can't be fetched from outside. Two tags in the head fix it —
og:imageandog:title— plus a 1200×630 picture. It isn't decoration: it is the difference between your link getting opened or scrolled past in a group chat. - How long before what shows up changes?
- What Google shows is the last copy it crawled, so a change to your title can take days or weeks to appear. In Search Console you can request reindexing of a single URL, which cuts that to hours. This tool doesn't look at Google's copy: it fetches your page now and shows you what Google will see next time it comes round.