Why preview your search snippet?
Your Google result is your shop window. Ranking #3 with a snippet people want to click can beat ranking #1 with a boring or cut-off one. A preview lets you catch the common mistakes before Google shows them to thousands of people:
- Titles that get chopped mid-word, with your brand or key benefit lost behind “…”
- Descriptions that trail off before the call to action
- Missing keywords, so nothing gets bolded when someone searches
- Messy URLs full of IDs and parameters
Desktop vs mobile snippets
More than 60% of Google searches happen on phones. On mobile, titles can wrap onto two lines, but descriptions have less room: roughly 680 pixels, compared with about 920 on desktop. Put the most important words first so both versions make sense. Switch the preview to Mobile to check.
How accurate is this preview?
We measure your text in Arial, the font Google uses for results, at the same sizes: 20px titles on desktop, 18px on mobile, and 14px descriptions. We then truncate at the same pixel widths Google does. Google also adjusts snippets on the fly: it may rewrite titles, pick a different description that better matches a query, or add sitelinks. Treat the preview as your best-case, what-you-control view. It’s the same approach professional SEO tools use.
About review stars: stars only appear if your page has valid Review or AggregateRating structured data and Google decides to show them. Since 2019, Google no longer shows stars for “self-serving” reviews of your own business on your own site. They still appear for products, recipes, software, courses and more.
Snippet checklist
- Title under ~600px, with the primary keyword in the first half
- Brand name at the end, separated by | or –
- Description of 120–158 characters that answers the query and gives a reason to click
- A clean, readable URL slug (
/leather-wallets, not/p?id=8812) - Structured data for rich results where it’s eligible