Bulk Title Tag Checker

What checking titles in bulk finds that one URL cannot

Most title defects are properties of one page and you can see them one page at a time. A title that is too long is too long on its own. A missing title is missing on its own. If that were the whole list, a bulk checker would only be a faster single checker.

It is not the whole list. The most expensive title problems are properties of a set, and they are invisible until the titles are lined up beside each other.

The first three rows are the argument for pasting a list rather than checking a page. They are also the ones that scale: a duplicate title is rarely one duplicate, because whatever produced it is producing it everywhere the same template runs. Repeated titles across a set are also the cheapest early warning of keyword cannibalization, since two pages given the same label are usually two pages chasing the same query, and of duplicate content underneath them. The on-site SEO checklist covers what to do once you know which pages collide.

Why the pixel width is the number, and the character count is a proxy

Google lays a result out in a container of fixed width and cuts the title when the text fills the line. Nothing in that process counts letters. Letters are not the same width, so two titles of identical length are cut in completely different places.

• Roughly 600 pixels on one desktop line, set in 20px Arial. A phone gives the title two shorter lines instead, so a title that survives one layout can die in the other.
• Capitals and wide letters cost more. A title in title case with several capital W and M characters can overflow at 48 characters.
• Narrow lowercase costs less. A title made of i, l, t and r characters can fit past 70 and still render in full.
• The 50 to 60 character rule is a hedge that keeps most titles inside the box most of the time. It is a reasonable default and a bad diagnosis.

What the cut costs you is clicks rather than rankings. The title tag is the line a searcher reads before deciding, so a title truncated mid-phrase is a straight hit to organic CTR on impressions you have already earned.

What the tool reads, and where other checkers get it wrong

Reading a title tag looks like one regular expression, and the obvious one is wrong in three ways that each produce a confident answer rather than an error. Getting these right matters more in bulk, because nobody reads fifty rows closely enough to notice that one of them is describing an icon.

• <title> is legal inside <svg>, where it is the accessible name of an icon. A checker that takes the first <title> in the document reports a page with no title as having one called Search or Menu. This tool reads the head, and tells you when it found one elsewhere.
• Titles are not always clean text. Matching everything up to the next < truncates any title with stray markup inside it, which is invalid and ships constantly from CMS templates. The element is read as a balanced range instead.
• Entities are characters. Tom & Jerry renders as twelve characters and measures as twelve, not the fourteen the raw markup contains. Entities are decoded before anything is counted or measured.
• A head can declare more than one title. Browsers take the first, so the count is reported rather than silently collapsed.

The meta tag checker reads titles through the same code, so the two tools cannot drift into disagreeing about what a page says its title is, and the SERP preview measures them with the same code, so they cannot disagree about where one is cut.

How to check title tags in bulk

Seven steps, ordered so the findings that are never judgement calls get dealt with before the ones that are.

1. 01

   Bring a list that means something together

   The findings that matter here are about the set, so paste URLs that belong to one group: every product in a category, every post in a series, every page a template renders. A random sample of a site cannot show you that a template is repeating itself.

2. 02

   Read the duplicates first

   Duplicate titles are the only finding on this page that is never a judgement call and never visible one URL at a time. Two pages with the same title are two pages Google has no way to tell apart in a result list.

3. 03

   Check the pixel column, not the character count

   Google cuts a title when it fills the line, at roughly 600 pixels on desktop. A title of wide capitals runs out of room at 48 characters while narrow lowercase survives past 70, so the character count is a proxy and the pixel figure is the answer.

4. 04

   Fix the missing titles before the long ones

   A page with no title gets one written for it, usually from the H1 or from the anchor text of links pointing at it. A page with a long title still says what you wrote, just less of it.

5. 05

   Look at what survives the cut

   The brand suffix is the last thing to truncate and the least useful thing to keep. If every title in the run ends with the same nine characters, that is nine characters of every result spent saying something the reader already knows from the URL.

6. 06

   Treat the pages declaring two title tags as a build problem

   A page with two title elements in its head has a title nobody chose. It almost always means a plugin and a theme are both writing one, so the fix is in the configuration rather than in the copy.

7. 07

   Export and sort by the pages that earn impressions

   A title defect on a page nobody finds is not worth an afternoon. Take the CSV into the same sheet as your Search Console export and fix the rows that already have impressions to lose.

For the list itself, the sitemap URL extractor pulls every URL out of an XML sitemap and the website URL extractor crawls a site that does not publish one. Both outputs paste straight into the box above.

What this checker reports

Frequently asked questions