YouTube Title Counter
Draft your title against the 100-character cap — while writing the part that matters to fit the ~70 characters that actually survive truncation in search and suggested videos.
100 of 100 remaining
The cap and the fold
One hundred characters is what YouTube accepts; roughly seventy is what viewers reliably see. Write to both: a front-loaded core that works alone at ~70 ("How to Solder Perfect Joints — Beginner's Guide"), then optional tail keywords inside the cap. If trimming to the fold hurts, cut adjectives before nouns — searchers scan for the subject, not the styling.
A worked title edit
Start with the title most drafts start as: "The Complete Beginner's Guide to Soldering Perfect Joints Every Time — Tools, Technique, Mistakes (2026)". That's 104 characters — it doesn't even clear the 100-character field, and at a ~70-character truncation it dies as "The Complete Beginner's Guide to Soldering Perfect Joints Every Time" — every specific, searchable word ("tools", "mistakes", the year) is in the amputated tail. Now front-load it: "Soldering for Beginners: Perfect Joints Every Time (Tools + Mistakes)" — 69 characters. The subject leads, the promise follows, and the whole thing survives truncation intact with 31 characters of cap to spare. That's the entire discipline of this page in one edit: the cap is a field size, the fold is the real deadline, and the fix is almost always cutting throat-clearing openers ("The Complete Guide to…") rather than content words.
Everything in the field counts toward 100 — spaces, punctuation, em dashes, and emoji alike — and as of mid-2026 YouTube's help documents the cap alongside a small set of rejected characters (angle brackets are the well-known ones). Where the fold falls is genuinely variable: search results, suggested-video rails, and phones each truncate at different widths, so ~70 is a planning number, not a promise — this counter tracks the hard 100 and leaves the fold judgment visible to you. Descriptions run on the same two-budget logic at different scale: 5,000 characters allowed, with only the first line or two shown above "Show more", so the description's opening sentence deserves title-level care. The common mistakes are the cap-first habits: writing to 100 because it's there, repeating in text what the thumbnail already shows, and spending the visible left edge on branding ("MyChannel · Ep. 47:") instead of the words a searcher typed.
Frequently asked questions
What is the YouTube title limit?
Titles cap at 100 characters. But search results and suggested-video cards truncate titles well before that — commonly around 60–70 characters depending on device — so the practical target for most creators is a title whose meaning survives at ~70.
Front-load or back-load keywords?
Front-load. The words most likely to be cut are the last ones, so put the search phrase and the hook early, and use the back half for secondary detail ("… | Full Tutorial 2026"). This is the same discipline as writing headlines for truncating feeds everywhere.
Do emoji work in titles?
They are allowed and each counts toward the 100 (this counter counts most as one). Used sparingly they can add scannability in a crowded results page; overused they read as spam and some get stripped in certain surfaces. One, early or not at all, is the common guidance.
What about descriptions and tags?
Descriptions allow 5,000 characters, with the first ~100–150 visible above "Show more" — the same fold logic as titles. Set our landing-page checker to a custom limit for those, or draft the visible opener against 150.
Counting is in Unicode code points; where YouTube's surfaces truncate varies by device. Nothing you type is transmitted or stored. See the methodology page.