Meta title length across 27 homepages, and why none matches its h1

FIELD TEST · 2026-08-18 · 30 sites · single snapshot

Sample and method: the same 30 sites from our robots.txt, sitemap and homepage structure surveys. One homepage request each, browser user agent, 2026-08-18, from an exit in Japan. Three sites refused us, so counts are out of 27. Same crawl as four other posts in this batch.

Meta title length across 27 homepages runs from 8 characters to 120, with a median of 40. Six titles pass 60, the figure most guidance quotes, and Google's documentation says there is no limit at all. The finding we did not expect sits next to it: 22 of these sites also ship an h1, and not one of the 22 says the same thing in both.

How we measured it

Fixed before the crawl, unchanged after.

1. Fetch the homepage once with a desktop browser user agent, following redirects.
2. Read the text inside <title> from the delivered HTML and count characters.
3. Read the first <h1> and count how many h1 elements the page contains.

Characters, not pixels, and no rendering. Two titles came back in Japanese because our requests exit there, which we cover below rather than quietly excluding.

What 27 homepages put in the title

The spread is wider than for any other field we have measured on these sites.

The BBC's 120-character title lists nine topic words after the brand. Substack's is one word. Both are deliberate, and the two ends of the range belong to two different jobs — one is trying to describe a whole newsroom, the other is a name people already search for.

Google's documentation gives no character limit

The 60-character figure is folklore that got repeated until it sounded official. What Google actually publishes is this: "While there's no limit on how long a <title> element can be, the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width." Read 2026-08-18 on the title link documentation at developers.google.com.

Truncation is a display behaviour tied to the reader's screen. It is not a validation rule, and a title is not wrong for being long. What a long title costs you is control over which half survives.

Not one homepage matches its own h1

Twenty-two of the 27 pages have at least one h1. In every single case the h1 text differs from the <title> text. Two come close by trimming the brand.

The publishers invert the pattern the tool companies use. Wired and Ars Technica spend the title on topic words and reduce the h1 to a brand name; Notion and Figma spend the title on positioning and use the h1 for a different sentence entirely. Neither approach is wrong. Both mean an extractor reading the page gets two answers to "what is this".

Three sites ship two h1 elements

Stripe, Webflow and Cloudflare each deliver two h1 elements on the homepage. Five deliver none: substack, techcrunch, theverge, hacker news and bbc.

Google's guidance on where title links come from speaks to both cases: "Google looks at various sources when creating title links, including the main visual title, heading elements, and other large and prominent text, and it can be confusing if multiple headings carry the same visual weight and prominence."

A second h1 does not add emphasis. It removes the thing that was emphasised.

What this crawl cannot tell you

We do not know how many of these titles Google displays unchanged. Checking that means looking at live results per site and per search term, which moves constantly and is a different study.

One number here also has a visible wobble. Canva delivered 3,051 bytes with no h1 when we crawled on 2026-08-17, and 436,314 bytes with one h1 on 2026-08-18 — same URL, same method, one day apart. We do not know which delivery a crawler gets, and it is a reminder that a single snapshot describes one moment, not a site.

Two more caveats we can name. Stripe and Slack returned Japanese titles because our exit is in Japan, so their character counts are for the Japanese homepage and not the English one. And a Latin character is not a CJK character on screen, which is why we report characters and refuse to translate them into pixels.

What to do about your own meta title length

Two habits worth keeping, two worth dropping.

• Front-load the specific part. If the display cuts it, the surviving half should still identify the page.
• Decide what the h1 is for before you write it. Repeating the title is defensible; contradicting it is not.
• Do not treat 60 characters as a rule. Google publishes no limit, and 6 of these 27 are past it on purpose.
• Do not ship two h1 elements to solve a layout problem. Style a heading down instead.

The same crawl measured the description field, whose folklore number has the same origin, in the meta description length survey. Which of these homepages ship no h1 at all, and why the two causes are different, is in the missing h1 tag survey. Checking titles and headings for agreement across a whole site is part of what QueryWin is being built to do.

Common questions

How did you measure this?

One request per homepage, browser user agent, redirects followed, on 2026-08-18. Character count of the <title> text, plus the first h1 and the count of h1 elements. No rendering.

Is there a meta title length limit?

No. Google's documentation says there is none and that the title link is truncated to fit the device. The 60-character figure describes display width on a desktop result, not a specification.

Should the title and the h1 be identical?

They can be. Not one of these 27 sites does it, which says more about how homepages get built than about what is correct. On a content page, keeping them close is easier to defend.

Does a long title hurt AI citations?

Not something we tested. An answer engine reads the page body, so the title is one statement of what the page is, sitting next to the h1 — which is exactly why disagreement between them is worth a look.