$ meta --analyse
Dev and APIMeta Tag Analyser — Title, Description and Open Graph
Give it a URL and see the meta tags it serves, how Google will display it, how the card looks when shared, and what needs fixing.
- no sign-up
- free
- nothing stored
What meta tags do
Meta tags are the lines inside <head> that describe a page to machines. Visitors never see them; Google, WhatsApp and ChatGPT read them before anything else. Four carry almost all the weight: title (which becomes the blue headline in a search result), meta description (the snippet right below), canonical (which address is the official version of that content) and meta robots (whether the page may be indexed).
The analysis above reads exactly the HTML the server delivers, without executing JavaScript — the same material a crawler meets on first contact. When the result differs from what your browser shows, that is not a flaw in the tool: it is the signal that content is being assembled client-side, and a good share of crawlers will never see it.
The length limits, and why they are ranges
A title performs best between 50 and 60 characters, a description between 70 and 160. Those numbers are useful approximations rather than rules: Google truncates results by pixel width, not character count. A title full of M and W is cut before one full of i and l at the same length. That is why the meters above mark ranges instead of a hard limit — the goal is to stay away from the edge, not to hit a number.
Falling below the minimum has its own cost. A five-character title describes nothing and wastes the most valuable space on the results page; an over-short description gets discarded by Google, which then builds the snippet from text lifted off the page — rarely the sentence you would have chosen.
Open Graph: the card people see when your link is shared
Open Graph tags control the preview rendered when a link is pasted into WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Slack or anywhere else. Three do the work: og:title, og:description and og:image. Without them, each platform improvises with whatever it finds — usually a truncated title and no image, which cuts the chance of anyone clicking.
og:image is where the mistakes cluster. It needs an absolute URL (a relative path simply will not load outside your domain) and a ratio close to 1200 × 630 pixels. Outside that ratio the image is cropped unpredictably, and the crop almost always eats the text you put on it.
One page here, the whole site in the audit
This tool analyses the URL you give it — enough to check a page before publishing or to investigate why a result looks odd in search. What it cannot do, by definition, is look at the relationships between pages: titles repeated across dozens of URLs, broken internal links, pages nothing else references, redirect chains. Those only surface by sweeping the complete site, which is the job of the CodeCrush audit.
## faq
Frequently asked questions
What are meta tags?
They are instructions in the HTML head that describe a page to non-humans: search engines, social networks and now AI assistants. The ones that matter most for SEO are the title (the blue text in a search result), the meta description (the snippet below it), the canonical (which URL is the official version of that content) and meta robots (whether the page may be indexed). Visitors never see them, but they decide how the page is presented everywhere outside your own site.
What is the ideal length for title and meta description?
A title between 50 and 60 characters fits whole in a Google result on most screens; beyond that it gets cut, and the cut usually lands on the part that made it distinctive. The meta description performs best between 70 and 160 characters. One detail that catches people out: Google truncates by pixel width, not character count, so a title full of wide letters (M, W) is cut sooner than one full of narrow ones. That is why these numbers are safe ranges rather than exact limits.
Does the meta description affect rankings?
Not directly — Google confirmed years ago that it is not a ranking factor. The effect is indirect and still worth the effort: the description is the sales pitch of the result, and a better click-through rate brings more visitors at the same position. Worth knowing: Google rewrites the description in a large share of cases, pulling text from the page when it judges that it answers the query better. A well-written description improves the odds of yours being kept.
What is the canonical tag for?
It declares which URL is the official version of a piece of content, solving the problem of the same page existing at several addresses — with and without a trailing slash, with campaign parameters, in a print version, on the www and non-www domain. Without it, search engines pick a version themselves and split ranking signals across the duplicates. One caution: the canonical is a strong hint, not an order, and a canonical pointing at the wrong page is one of the fastest ways to drop content out of search without noticing.
What are Open Graph tags?
They control the card shown when someone shares your link — on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack and practically anywhere that renders a preview. The three doing the work are og:title, og:description and og:image. Without them, each platform builds the card from whatever it can find, which usually means a truncated title and no image at all. og:image deserves attention: it needs an absolute URL and a ratio close to 1200×630 pixels, or the image shows up cropped.
Why does the analysis differ from what I see in my browser?
Because we analyse the HTML as it leaves the server, without executing JavaScript — exactly what a crawler sees on first contact. If your site builds the title, description or content in the browser through a front-end framework, none of that appears here. And that is precisely the point: Google does render JavaScript, but on a second pass that can lag, and several other crawlers render nothing at all. A large gap between what shows here and what you see on screen is a signal worth investigating.
Does the tool analyse the whole site?
No, only the URL you provide. That is deliberate: a single-page analysis is fast, free and answers the most common question, which is checking one specific page before or after publishing. To sweep the entire site — crawling every URL, running cross-page checks (duplicate titles, broken links, orphan pages) and comparing against competitors — there is the full CodeCrush audit.
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