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Meta Tag Generator

Emits title, description, canonical, Open Graph and Twitter tags with live length warnings. Copy-ready head HTML, all in your browser.

By Hongtao Ren · Updated 2026-09-22

Fill in the fields and get a complete, copy-ready block of <head> tags. Every length counter updates as you type, so you can see exactly where Google will truncate your title or description before you publish.

How to use it

1. Enter the page title and meta description you plan to publish.
2. Watch the counters — amber means close to truncation, red means it will almost certainly be cut.
3. Copy the generated block into your page's <head>.

Why the counters are approximate, and why that is fine

Google does not cut snippets at a fixed character count. It measures rendered pixel width and trims whatever does not fit, which is why a title of 58 narrow characters can survive while a 52-character one full of capital W and M gets cut.

The counters here use the widely used working limits — about 60 characters for titles and about 155 for descriptions — as a planning target rather than a guarantee. Treat amber as 'check this one by eye', not as an error.

The tags most people forget

A canonical tag is the cheapest fix for duplicate-content problems caused by URL parameters, trailing slashes or www variants. If your page is reachable at more than one address, pick one and point canonical at it.

Open Graph and Twitter tags do not affect rankings, but they decide whether your link looks credible when someone pastes it into Slack, LinkedIn or X. A page with no og:image renders as a bare grey box, and bare grey boxes do not get clicked.

The favicon lines it emits, and why they are three lines

The generator always appends three declarations: favicon.ico with sizes="48x48", favicon.svg with type="image/svg+xml", and an apple-touch-icon.png. All three paths must be real files on your server — none of them is optional decoration.

The .ico is the one that matters for search. Google Search's supported favicon formats are BMP, GIF, ICO, PNG, JPEG, PPM and TIFF, and the file has to be fetchable by Googlebot-Image. SVG is not on that list, which is why a site whose only icon is an SVG keeps its browser-tab icon and loses the one in the search result. A data: URI has the same problem for a different reason: there is no URL for the crawler to fetch.

Our survey of 61 homepages found 13 sites declaring an SVG icon — and every one of them also ships a raster file, which is the pattern worth copying: SVG as an enhancement, not as the only icon.

The tags that matter, and the ones that are decoration

Six things do real work. Title — the clickable headline. Meta description — not a ranking factor, but it is the ad copy for the result. Canonical — which of the addresses for this page is the one to index. Robots — whether the page may be indexed and followed at all. Viewport — without it mobile rendering is wrong, and mobile is most of your traffic. Open Graph and Twitter card — how the link looks when it is pasted somewhere else.

Then there is a long tail of tags that do nothing and still ship on a surprising number of sites. meta keywords has been ignored by Google since 2009. revisit-after, rating, distribution and generator are not used by any major crawler. They cost bytes and, more importantly, they cost attention: a head full of dead tags is a head nobody checks.

If you audit only one thing, audit for the dead tags. Removing them is free, and it makes the tags that do something visible again.

Canonical tag or 301 redirect — they are not interchangeable

Both consolidate duplicate URLs, and picking the wrong one is a common and expensive mistake.

A 301 redirect is a directive. The old address stops being an address: anyone who requests it is sent to the new one. Use it when the duplicate has no reason to exist — a retired URL, an old path after a migration, a page you have genuinely replaced.

A canonical tag is a hint applied to a page that must keep working. Tracking parameters, sort and filter variants, pagination, print views, and syndicated copies on other domains all need to stay reachable for users while you indicate which one should be indexed. Google can and does ignore canonicals it disagrees with, which is why it is a hint rather than a directive.

Two rules prevent most of the damage. Never point a canonical at a URL that redirects — the target must return 200. And never put a canonical on a page that already 301s, because nobody will ever read it.

What this tool deliberately does not do

It does not fetch your live page. Checking what you actually published means asking a server to request your URL, and browsers block that for pages on other domains. A tool that worked around it would have to send your address through someone else's infrastructure, which is the opposite of the privacy this site is built around.

It also does not validate that your canonical URL returns 200, or that your OG image file actually exists. Both are worth confirming before you ship, and both take one request in any HTTP client — or a quick look at your browser's network panel.

What you get instead is something narrower and, in practice, more useful while you are writing: a correct block of tags and an honest warning when a field is long enough to be cut.

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