Free tool

YouTube Title Checker: See Where Every Feed Cuts Your Title

Type a title and watch it get truncated the way desktop search, the suggested sidebar and a phone feed truncate it. No score, no grade. Just the character count against the 100 limit, the words that fall off each surface, and five plain checks. Free, no signup, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Title checker

0 / 100 characters

Everything below is worked out in this tab. The title is never posted to a server, ours or anyone else's, and nothing is stored when you close the page.

That is an example title. Clear it and paste your own.

1. Where each surface cuts it

YouTube measures the rendered pixel width of your title, not its character count, so these cuts are close approximations rather than exact rules. Wide capitals push the cut earlier, narrow lowercase pushes it later.

Desktop search results, cuts near 70 characters

Your channel · 12K views · 2 days ago

Suggested sidebar, cuts near 50 characters

Your channel · 12K views

Mobile app feed, cuts near 40 characters

Your channel · 12K views · 2d

2. Five checks, no score

Each line is a pass or a flag with the reason next to it. None of them are rules. They are the five things that quietly cost titles clicks, and you get to decide which ones matter for this video.

    Nothing was uploaded and nothing was stored.

    How long can a YouTube title be?

    The hard limit is 100 characters including spaces. Go past it and the title box simply refuses to save. The useful limit is a lot shorter than that, because almost nobody ever sees 100 characters of a title. Desktop search gives you roughly the first 70, the up next sidebar around 50, and a phone feed around 40. Anything after those points still counts for search, but it does not exist for the person deciding whether to click.

    Where does YouTube cut off a video title?

    It depends on the surface, and the honest version is that YouTube measures rendered pixel width, not characters. A title packed with wide capitals is cut earlier than the same character count in lowercase. The approximations above are what those widths work out to for a normal mixed case title, and the practical takeaway does not change with the exact number: put the subject and the promise in the first 40 characters and treat everything after that as a bonus for the people who see the long version.

    Should a YouTube title be in all caps?

    One or two words, yes. The whole title, no, and it costs you twice. Capitals are wider, so an all caps title truncates earlier on every surface. And a block of uppercase is genuinely harder to read at feed size than sentence case, because the shape of a word in lowercase carries information that a rectangle of capitals throws away. YouTube's own interface sets every title in sentence case, so a shouting title fights the layout it sits in instead of standing out in it.

    Do clickbait words help a YouTube title?

    High-arousal words raise the emotional temperature, and one of them can carry a real promise. Shocking, exposed, gone wrong, you won't believe. The count above is neutral on purpose, because there is nothing wrong with a hot word attached to something that actually happened. Three or more stacked together is where it stops working, since the title starts reading as a template rather than a specific claim. The title and the thumbnail are one package anyway, and the packaging patterns that are working right now are covered in the 2026 YouTube thumbnail trends.

    Once the title is settled, check the artwork that sits next to it. The thumbnail safe-zone checker shows what YouTube's own interface covers up.

    Your title is text. Your thumbnail should be too.

    DesignerOP builds thumbnails from real independent layers with real editable type, so the words on the image can be rewritten as easily as the words in the title box. No re-render, no garbled letters, no extra credit. Prelaunch, waitlist open.

    Join the waitlist