Bulk Meta Length Checker
Paste hundreds of titles or meta descriptions and find every one that is too long, too short, missing or duplicated.
The question a catalogue actually asks
Every SEO plugin will tell you whether the page you are currently editing has a good meta description. None of them answers the question a store with four thousand products has, which is which ones are wrong — and opening four thousand editor screens to find out is not an answer either.
This tool takes the whole set at once. Export from your CMS or a crawler, paste, and every row is measured in one pass.
Four findings, in order of how much they cost you
- Duplicated. The most informative finding and the one a single-page tool structurally cannot produce. If 300 products share a description, a template wrote it, and those pages say nothing that distinguishes them. Google commonly discards a duplicated description and extracts its own text instead, so the generation effort bought nothing.
- Empty. Not an error — Google will construct a snippet — but you have handed over the choice. On a well-structured article the extract is usually fine; on a product page it is often a fragment of a spec table.
- Too long. Truncated at the end, which is where people put the call to action. The tool highlights exactly which words would be dropped.
- Very short. The mildest finding: no penalty, just room left unused, and a slightly higher chance Google substitutes its own text.
Measured in pixels
Truncation is by rendered width, not character count — WWW and illare three characters and nothing like the same width. Every row here is measured with your browser’s own text engine against Arial at Google’s approximate desktop sizes: about 600px for a title and 960px for a description.
Those widths are observed, not published. Google has never documented a limit and changes the effective width without notice, so a row a few pixels over is a judgement call rather than a defect. Rows well over are not.
Getting the data out of WordPress
Where your descriptions live depends on which SEO plugin you run, and they do not agree:
- Yoast SEO — post meta, under
_yoast_wpseo_metadesc. Note that Yoast’s frontend reads its own indexables table rather than post meta, so an export from one may not match the other. - Rank Math — post meta, under
rank_math_description. - All in One SEO — not post meta at all. Its own database table, with its own schema.
- SEOPress — post meta, under
_seopress_titles_desc.
Field names change between major versions of these plugins, so verify against your own install rather than trusting any list, including this one. A site crawler that reads the rendered <meta name="description"> sidesteps the whole question and is usually the faster route.
Then what?
Finding the gap is the easy half, and it is the half that is free. Filling it — writing four thousand descriptions that are specific enough not to be duplicates of each other — is the part that takes real time, and it is what Metaly is being built to do in bulk. That generation is not finished yet, and the product page says exactly which parts are and are not.
In the meantime this tool is genuinely free and genuinely useful on its own, which is the only kind of tool worth publishing.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I check meta descriptions in bulk?
- Export the titles and descriptions from your CMS or crawler, paste them into this tool, and every row is measured at once. It accepts a tab-separated paste from a spreadsheet, quoted CSV, or one description per line, and reports which rows are too long, too short, empty or duplicated. Nothing is uploaded — measurement happens in your browser.
- Why do duplicate meta descriptions matter?
- Because they are usually a symptom rather than the disease. A template produced the same text for 300 products, which means those 300 pages say nothing that distinguishes them from each other. Google frequently discards a duplicated description and extracts its own passage instead, so the effort spent generating them buys nothing.
- Is a missing meta description a problem?
- It is not an error, and Google will construct a snippet from the page. Whether that is a problem depends on the page: a well-structured article usually yields a reasonable extract, while a product page often yields a fragment of a spec table. The reason to care about a missing description is that you gave up the choice, not that anything is broken.
- What counts as too short?
- Below about 400 pixels — roughly 70 characters — a description is usually leaving room unused rather than being efficient. Google is also more likely to substitute its own text when given very little to work with. There is no penalty for a short description; it is an opportunity cost, and this tool flags it as such rather than as an error.
- Can I export the results?
- Yes. The CSV export includes every row with its pixel width, the limit, its status, whether it is duplicated, and the exact text that would be truncated away — so it can go straight back into whatever produced the descriptions in the first place.
- Does this upload my data anywhere?
- No. Parsing and measurement both happen in your browser using its own text-rendering engine. Nothing is sent to a server, which is also why it works on an unpublished staging catalogue.
Working on a single page instead? The snippet preview shows exactly where the cut lands, as you type.