Free on-page seo check
Meta Tag Checker with search preview
See the title and description a search engine reads, how the result could look, and whether the canonical, robots, viewport and language tags are set correctly.
Check meta tags
Enter a page. Its head is read and a search result preview is built from it.
Why use the Meta Tag Checker
Search result preview
The title and description are laid out the way a search result shows them, truncated where search engines cut them.
Length guidance
Titles of roughly 30 to 60 characters and descriptions of 70 to 160 fit most results without being cut.
Directives read
The meta robots tag and the X-Robots-Tag header are read, so a stray noindex is caught.
Mobile and language
The viewport tag and the html lang attribute are checked, both easy to forget and both used by search engines.
When to use the Meta Tag Checker
Writing titles
Check how a new title will look before the page is indexed.
CMS templates
Confirm a template fills in the title and description on every page type.
Duplicate titles
Run a standard audit to find titles shared by several pages.
Client handover
Show a client the exact tags their pages send, with a preview.
After a redesign
New themes often lose the description or the language attribute.
Debugging a snippet
When search shows the wrong text, check what the page actually sends.
Understanding Meta Tag
The tags that matter
- 1title. The most important on-page signal and the headline of the search result.
- 2meta description. Not a ranking factor, but often used as the snippet, so it shapes clicks.
- 3canonical. Which url should be indexed when several show the same content.
- 4robots, viewport and lang. Whether to index, how to render on phones and which language the page is in.
Why search engines rewrite titles
Google rewrites titles that are too long, stuffed with keywords, identical across pages or that do not match the content. A clear, specific title of about 50 to 60 characters is the one most likely to be shown as written.
Meta keywords
The meta keywords tag has been ignored by Google for over a decade and is not checked. Spend the effort on the title and the content instead.
Privacy, safety and limits
The page is fetched by AbackAuditBot from Aback servers with an ordinary GET request. No cookie, password or form data is sent, and nothing on the site is changed.
The tags are read from the HTML the server sends. Tags that a script adds after the page loads are not seen, and neither are they by most crawlers and preview bots.
Related tools and guides
Frequently asked questions
How long should a title tag be?
Roughly 30 to 60 characters. Search engines truncate by pixel width, so wide letters fit fewer characters. Put the most important words first.
How long should a meta description be?
Roughly 70 to 160 characters. Longer descriptions are cut, shorter ones may be replaced by text from the page.
Does the meta description affect ranking?
Not directly. It affects whether people click the result, which is why it is worth writing well.
Why does Google show a different description?
Google often picks text from the page that better matches the query. A specific, accurate description is used more often.
Do I still need meta keywords?
No. Major search engines ignore them.
Does the checker see tags added by JavaScript?
No. It reads the server HTML, like most crawlers and preview bots. Put meta tags in the server response.
Can I write the tags here?
Use the meta tag generator to write a complete head with Open Graph and Twitter tags, then paste it into your page.