YouTube title and tag counter
Check your title, description and tags in one place: this YouTube title and tag counter checks each against YouTube's limits as you type.
Last updated
Your text stays in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.
How to use the YouTube title and tag counter
- Type your video title. A preview shows roughly what fits on a phone.
- Paste your description and watch the count out of 5,000.
- Enter your tags separated by commas, such as cooking, easy recipes, pasta.
- Trim anything shown in red, then copy each field into YouTube Studio.
How the YouTube title and tag counter works
YouTube limits titles to 100 characters, descriptions to 5,000 and all tags together to 500. Each field here has its own counter and bar, so you can see at a glance which one needs trimming.
Tags are counted the way YouTube Studio counts them: the characters of every tag, plus the commas between them, plus 2 extra for any tag that contains a space, because YouTube stores those tags in quotation marks. That is why the tag total is often higher than you expect.
Formula
Tag length = sum of characters in each tag + (number of tags − 1) for the commas + 2 for each tag that contains a space. Characters left = 500 − tag length.
Example
The tags cooking, easy recipes, pasta count as 7 + 12 + 5 = 24 characters, plus 2 for the quotes around easy recipes and 2 for the commas: 28 in total, leaving 472.
A title of 72 characters is within the limit, but the preview shows that only about the first 60 are likely to be visible in search results on a phone.
Tips and common mistakes
Front-load your title
Put the words people search for near the start, because long titles are cut on small screens.
Use the description's first lines
Only the opening of a description shows above the more link, so summarise the video there.
Make a matching thumbnail
Thumbnails are 1280 by 720 pixels. Get your image to that size with the image resizer.
Sharing a clip elsewhere?
Write the caption for other networks with the TikTok caption counter or the X character counter.
Tags are a small signal
YouTube relies mostly on the title, description and thumbnail to understand a video. Add a few accurate tags, including common misspellings, rather than filling all 500 characters.
Frequently asked questions
How many characters can a YouTube title have?
100 characters, including spaces and emoji.
What is the limit for YouTube tags?
500 characters across all tags combined, counted with commas and with quotation marks around tags that contain spaces.
How long can a description be?
5,000 characters.
Are my titles and tags stored?
No. Counting happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded.