Japanese Title and Description Length: Count Pixels, Not Characters

Ask three Japanese SEO agencies how long a title should be and you’ll get three answers: 30, 32, maybe 35. Ask about meta descriptions and the spread gets wider: 70, 120, 160. Everyone is a little bit right, because the question is a little bit wrong.

Google doesn’t count characters. It measures how much room the text takes and cuts it where the room runs out. In Japanese, where almost every character is full width, that changes the maths quite a bit.

In short
Google sets no limit on title or description length. It cuts both to fit the screen, so what matters is width, not the number of characters. On desktop a title has room for roughly 29 full-width Japanese characters, against 55 to 60 Latin letters. Put the keyword and the reason to click in the first 15 to 20 characters, write digits half-width, and treat every character count, ours included, as a rough guide.

Google measures width, not characters

Google’s title link documentation is blunt about it: there is no limit on how long a title element can be, and the title link is truncated “as needed, typically to fit the device width”. The snippet documentation says exactly the same about meta descriptions. Both pages also remind you who has the last word. Google can build the title link from the title element, the main heading or other text on the page, and the snippet usually comes from page content rather than from your description.

Width is where Japanese gets interesting. A kanji, hiragana or katakana character is roughly square, one em wide. A Latin letter is about half that, and narrow letters like i and l much less. Google publishes no width, so every number here is an estimate. DeepSpider’s own estimate uses 580 pixels at a 20 pixel font, a third-party figure for desktop results. That fits about 29 full-width characters, while an English title of the same width runs to 55 or 60.

What Japanese practitioners recommend

Japanese advice clusters around 30 characters. Sungrove’s title guide, updated in September 2026, says to aim for about 30 and calls it a guideline rather than a rule. Ask about descriptions and the Xserver blog suggests about 70 characters for smartphones and 90 to 120 on desktop, and recommends writing for the phone.

The figures wobble, sometimes inside a single article. One 2026 guide recommends 28 to 32 characters in one section, 30 to 32 in its FAQ and 30 to 40 in another part, without naming a source for any of them. That isn’t sloppiness so much as a sign of what these numbers are: someone’s observation of where the cut fell on a given day and device.

None of these is a Google number. Use them as a starting point and check how your titles actually look in a real search.

Writing titles that survive the cut

• Front-load. Put the search phrase and the reason to click in the first 15 to 20 characters. Whatever falls after the cut can still help Google understand the page, but people won’t read it.
• Write digits and letters half-width. 20 is narrower than ２０, and in DeepSpider’s estimate ＳＥＯ対策 takes about a fifth more room than SEO対策 (100 against 82 pixels).
• Count your decorations. 【最新】, ｜ and ★ each take a full character width. That can be four characters gone before the title has said anything.
• Go easy on brackets. In Zyppy’s study of 80,959 titles, Google rewrote 77.6% of titles with square brackets, against 61.9% with parentheses. The study didn’t look at Japanese 【】 separately, so take it as a hint and check how your own titles appear in search.
• Keep the site name at the end, or drop it. Google may leave a site name out of the title link when the result already shows it.

Descriptions: write for the phone, expect a rewrite

Meta descriptions get rewritten even more often than titles. Ahrefs found that Google rewrote 62.78% of the descriptions it studied, and keeping within a length limit made almost no difference: 61.46% of the long ones were rewritten, and 63.69% of the rest. The study is from 2020, so the exact share has surely moved, but the lesson hasn’t. A description is a suggestion.

So write one good one. Put what the page offers and why it’s worth the click in the first 70 characters or so, where a phone shows it, and let the rest add detail up to about 120. If the description doesn’t match the page, Google takes text from the page instead, which is one more reason to keep it honest.

How DeepSpider.ai handles Japanese titles

DeepSpider detects Japanese pages and judges them by Japanese rules, not English ones.

• Title and description length are counted in characters, with their own ranges for Japanese pages: 15 to 35 for titles and 50 to 120 for descriptions. You can change them in Settings → General → Japanese websites. They are review guidelines, not Google limits.
• Titles wider than Google shows estimates each title’s width in pixels, with full-width characters counted as one em, and lists titles wider than 580 pixels. The limit is in Settings → General → Check thresholds.
• Main content on Japanese pages is counted in characters instead of words, so a short Japanese page isn’t judged by an English word count.
• A Japanese websites topic adds checks that only Japanese sites need, a small Japanese flag marks Japanese pages in the results, and the Japanese-language SEO Daily Brief collects news from Japanese SEO sources. More about the topic in SEO for Japanese Websites: Five Checks Only Japan Needs.

Frequently asked questions

Is 32 characters the rule for Japanese titles?

No. It’s a practitioner rule of thumb close to where the desktop cut tends to fall. Google publishes no number, and a title with plenty of half-width digits and letters fits more characters before the cut.

Do phones show more of the title?

Often, because the title can wrap onto a second line, and Japanese guides tend to quote a few more characters for phones. Screens vary a lot, though, so the first 15 to 20 characters are the ones that count on every device.

Does a cut title hurt rankings?

Not by itself. Google doesn’t rank pages by title length, and it still reads the whole title element. The cost is that people see less of it, and a long, cluttered title is more likely to be rewritten.

The short version

Google cuts titles and descriptions by width, not by character count. In Japanese that leaves room for roughly 29 full-width characters in a desktop title and about 70 description characters before a phone cuts in. Lead with what matters, write digits half-width, go light on decorations, and check the result in a real search instead of trusting a character counter. Ours included.

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