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Free check · Titles

Title tag checker

Read the title element on a page and the pages it links to. Find missing, empty, duplicated and repeated titles, see each page's main heading beside its title, and see each title's length without an invented limit.

Loads the URL you enter and the home page, then pages they link to, up to 15 pages in all. Free, no account needed.

What the checker reads

Enter a page and the checker loads it, the home page and the pages they link to, fifteen pages in all. On each it reads every titleelement, wherever the parser placed it, and reports its text, its length in characters and the line it sits on, next to the text of the page's first h1. Titles are compared after whitespace and letter case are normalized, so two pages that differ only in capitalization still count as duplicates.

Why the title element matters

Google builds the title link of a search result, the clickable headline above the snippet, from several sources on the page, and the title element is the one written for that purpose. Google explains what is at stake:

“Title links are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it's relevant to their query.”

[G-TITLE] Best practices for influencing title links

Its first request is simple: “Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> element”[G-TITLE]. The HTML Standard is stricter about the head of an ordinary document, which takes “One or more elements of metadata content, of which exactly one is a title element and no more than one is a base element.”[WHATWG-SEM]

What Google asks of a title

The best practices fit in a few lines. “Write descriptive and concise text for your <title> elements. Avoid vague descriptors like "Home" for your home page”[G-TITLE]. “Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose text in your <title> elements.”[G-TITLE] And each page needs its own: “Avoid repeated or boilerplate text in <title> elements. It's important to have distinct text that describes the content of the page”[G-TITLE]

Branding has a place, once. Google suggests you “consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each <title> element, separated from the rest of the text with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe”[G-TITLE]. Descriptive terms do too, in moderation:

“Avoid keyword stuffing. It's sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the <title> element, but there's no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times.”

[G-TITLE] Best practices for influencing title links

Two more points concern consistency with the page. “Use the same language and writing system (meaning, the script or alphabet for a given language) as the primary content on your pages.”[G-TITLE] And “Make it clear which text is the main title for the page.”[G-TITLE], which is why the checker prints the first h1 beside each title. When a page has several large, prominent headings, Google notes that it “may use the first heading as the text for the title link.”[G-TITLE] When the title and the page disagree, Google may write its own:

“Google Search might modify the title link to better help users if it determines that the page title doesn't reflect the page content.”

[G-TITLE] Common issues and how Google manages them

About length

The checker shows each title's length and stops there. No primary source sets a character limit for titles, and the figure many audit tools enforce is contradicted by Google itself. The myth guard also covers the rule about headings that often travels with it:

From the myth guard, which lists every claim the scanner refuses to score and why.
ClaimVerdictWhat the source says
Titles must be about 60 charactersContradicted"While there's no limit on how long a <title> element can be, the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed" [G-TITLE]
Every page needs exactly one H1Not supportedGoogle: heading order doesn't matter for Search; the HTML Standard allows several top-level headings [G-STARTER][WHATWG-SECTIONS]

Treat the count as a prompt to reread a title that has grown into a sentence, not as a target to hit.

Common title problems

One title across many pages

Templates that print only the site name, or a default that pages never override, give the whole site one title. The checker groups pages that share a title and lists them. Generate titles from a page-specific field, and add the site name once through a template suffix.

A home page called “Home”

It is the example Google itself gives of a vague descriptor, and the checker flags it. Name what the site is or does instead, with the brand at the start or the end.

Two title elements

It happens when a theme and an SEO plugin each print one. The checker reads the first title in the head as the page's title and reports the others with their line numbers. Remove the duplicate so one template slot renders the title.

A title outside the head

A title that the parser meets after the head has closed lands in the body, and the page is reported as having no title in its head. The element that closed the head early usually sits just above it. The canonical tag checker and the hreflang checker catch the same problem through the links it displaces.

Rewriting titles

This checker reports; it does not write. For rewrites built from a page's own content, the full scanner offers an optional advisory AI review. Its suggestions are labeled as model output, never set a character target and never touch the score. Descriptions follow the same logic, and the meta description checker reads them the same way.

The rules this checker runs

Each is a rule from the full ruleset, run by the same evaluator, with the same reason templates and citations. A rule's page lists its fail conditions and the passages it rests on. Informational rules (C4) never produce an issue.

  • SEO-HEAD-01Each page has exactly one non-empty titleC2 Recommended· w4
  • SEO-HEAD-01BNo more than one title elementC3 Standard· w2
  • SEO-META-01Titles are distinct and descriptiveC2 Recommended· w4
  • SEO-HDG-01Heading inventoryC4 Informational· w0

Primary sources

The documentation this page and its rules rest on, with the date each page showed and the date its wording was last checked. The source registry lists every source the scanner may cite.

This page checks one thing. The full audit runs all 70 scored rules.

It covers 16 categories on up to 200 pages, orders the fixes by the strength of the evidence behind them and prints its score with the arithmetic. Every finding cites the primary source it rests on. No account is needed.

Run the full 70-rule audit