SERP pixel widths: the 2026 measurement reference

How we measure

realserp measures width with the browser's canvas measureText method, with the font set to Google's render stack: bold 20px Arial, Arimo, "Liberation Sans", Helvetica, sans-serif for titles and 14px Arial, Arimo, "Liberation Sans", Helvetica, sans-serif for descriptions. Arial is Google's desktop render font; Arimo and Liberation Sans are metric-identical stand-ins on other systems, so the measured width is stable across platforms.

measureText returns CSS logical pixels regardless of your screen's device pixel ratio, which is the same coordinate space Google truncates in. We leave the canvas unscaled so the reading matches Google's logical pixels, not your physical display. The truncation cut is placed at the last character whose width, with the ellipsis appended, still fits the budget.

Where the budgets come from, and the honest gaps

Budget and font size are a matched pair: a 600-pixel title budget only means something paired with the font it was measured at, Arial bold 20 pixels. We ship the values that live reference tools actually hardcode, so a title that fits here fits there too. But the numbers genuinely disagree between reputable, currently-maintained sources, and it is more honest to show that than to pretend one figure is settled.

• Desktop title: Portent and Search Wilderness both hardcode 600px; Screaming Frog's current default is 561px, SISTRIX says 580px, and an older 512px figure still circulates. We ship 600px.
• Mobile title: there is no consensus, and SISTRIX's 920px is almost certainly a data-entry error (it matches the desktop-description figure). More important, Google wraps mobile titles onto a second line rather than cutting them on one, so a single-line pixel budget is a conservative guide, not a hard cutoff. We ship 560px and label it that way.
• Desktop description: 920px (Screaming Frog 2014), 928px (Search Wilderness), and 985px (Screaming Frog's current default). We ship 920px.
• Font size: even the render size is disputed. Search Wilderness and Zyppy measure at 20px, Portent at 18px.

Zyppy's large study measures how often Google rewrites titles, not where it cuts them, so it is not a source for these budgets. And here is the part worth saying plainly: no one has published a from-scratch render-and-measure study of either device for 2024 through 2026. That is the open gap realserp fills by running its own remeasurement pass and publishing it here, dated.

Measured fact versus sourced guidance

Being honest about precision: the mechanism is measured fact. Google truncates on rendered width, Arial is the desktop render font, and we measure that width directly. Everything downstream is softer. Google documents no fixed length limit at all, and Gary Illyes has called the 50-to-70 character convention "externally made-up" by the SEO industry, so treat every budget as a best-effort approximation of undocumented, changeable behaviour, not a spec. The desktop budgets are the best corroborated; the mobile budgets and the character equivalents are softer still. A well-fitted tag is necessary, not sufficient, because Google rewrites a large share of titles regardless of length. The methodology page covers how we keep these numbers current.