How to Preview Your Google Search Result Before Publishing
A search result is a title, a URL and two lines of description, and it is the only advertisement for your page that most people ever see. The SERP Snippet Preview shows how yours will look.
The limits are pixels, not characters
This is the thing character counts get wrong. Google truncates titles at roughly 580 pixels and descriptions at around 920 pixels on desktop, and a pixel limit treats letters unequally.
A title of sixty narrow characters - iillliitt - fits comfortably. Sixty wide ones - MMWWOO - does not. So a title of 58 characters can be cut while one of 64 survives, which is why two pages with the same character count can display differently and why a preview beats a counter here.
As a rough guide, 60 characters for a title and 155 for a description keeps most text visible. The preview is what tells you about the exception.
Google will often rewrite it anyway
Worth being realistic. Google rewrites titles on a substantial share of results when it judges yours unhelpful, and replaces descriptions very frequently - often lifting a sentence from the page that matches the query better than yours does.
You cannot prevent this. What makes it less likely is a title that is accurate, specific to the page and not keyword-stuffed, and a description that reads as a sentence rather than a list of terms.
Which means the description's real job is not to be displayed verbatim. It is to be a good default, and to give Google a well-written option to choose from.
What a preview actually lets you fix
The truncation point, so the sentence does not end mid-word at the exact moment it mattered.
Front-loading. Seeing the visible portion alone shows whether the useful words are in it. A title reading "Complete Guide to Everything You Need to Know About..." has spent its visible space on nothing.
The URL, which is displayed as a breadcrumb path and is read by people deciding whether to click. A clean, readable address looks trustworthy; a string of ids does not. The URL Structure Analyzer checks it.
Bolding. Google bolds words matching the query, so a description containing the phrase people actually search draws the eye in a way one full of synonyms does not.
Common questions
Why is my description different in search?
Google chose a passage from your page instead. Normal, and it usually means its choice matched the query better.
Does the description affect rankings?
No. It affects the click-through rate, which is a different and still valuable thing.
Do mobile and desktop truncate the same?
No - mobile shows a shorter title and often a longer description. Check both if a page matters.
Should I include the brand in the title?
Usually at the end, and Google frequently appends the site name itself.
Want to see a result before you publish it?