AM A listing title that is two characters too long gets cut off, rejected or silently truncated. This character counter shows the count as you type, with and without spaces, and puts your text against the limits of the platforms sellers and marketers use most, with a bar for each one that turns red when you go over.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded or stored.
How to use the character counter
- Type or paste your text into the box at the top of this page.
- Read the total characters, characters without spaces, words and lines in the count panel.
- Check the limit bars. Each shows how much of that platform's limit you have used.
- Trim until the bar for your target platform is inside the limit, keeping the most important words at the start.
- Copy the text and paste it into the platform, then confirm with the platform's own counter if it has one.
Platform character limits
| Field | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| X (Twitter) post | 280 | Weighted count; X Premium allows longer posts |
| SEO meta title | About 60 | Google truncates by pixel width, not characters |
| Meta description | About 155 | Guideline for display, not a hard limit |
| Instagram bio | 150 | Hard limit |
| TikTok bio | 80 | Hard limit |
| YouTube video title | 100 | Shorter titles show in full in more places |
| Amazon product title | 200 | Some categories are lower; words may appear no more than twice |
| Etsy listing title | 140 | Etsy advises short, readable titles |
| eBay listing title | 80 | Hard limit |
Platforms change their limits from time to time. If a field rejects text that fits here, the platform's current rule wins, so check its help pages.
The two SEO lines are different from the rest. Google has no character limit for titles or meta descriptions. It cuts them to fit the screen based on pixel width, so 60 and 155 are practical guides for what usually shows in full. The meta tag analyzer shows how a live page's title and description look in a result preview.
Characters, spaces and line breaks
Every platform above counts spaces and punctuation as characters. Line breaks usually count too, often as one character each. The count without spaces is mainly useful for translation quotes, some academic limits and SMS planning; for platform limits, use the total.
Watch for invisible characters when you paste from a PDF, spreadsheet or supplier page: non-breaking spaces, double spaces and trailing line breaks all add to the count. The case converter can strip extra spaces and line breaks in one click.
Why emoji and some characters count differently
What looks like one character on screen can be several characters inside the computer. Text is stored as Unicode code points, and many emoji are built from two or more of them. A skin-tone thumbs-up is two code points, a family emoji can be five or more joined together, and flags are made of two letter symbols. Accented letters can be stored as one code point or as a letter plus a separate accent mark.
Platforms handle this in different ways:
- X uses a weighted count. Its documentation says every emoji counts as 2 characters whatever its complexity, Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count as 2 each, and any link counts as 23 characters regardless of its real length.
- Many websites and apps count JavaScript string length, which counts most emoji as 2 and complex emoji as more.
- Some systems count bytes. Amazon's backend search terms field, for example, is limited in bytes, and accented letters and emoji take 2 to 4 bytes each in UTF-8.
Because of this, any counter, including this one, can differ from a platform by a few characters when text contains emoji, symbols or non-Latin scripts. If you are within five characters of a hard limit, check in the platform itself. The same applies to curly quotes, long dashes and other typographic symbols copied from word processors, which some forms count or display differently from plain keyboard characters.
Tip: Marketplace titles rarely benefit from emoji. Amazon's title rules restrict decorative symbols, and on eBay and Etsy every character spent on an emoji is one less for a search term.
Writing titles that fit
- Put the product type and main keyword first. On every platform, the start of the title shows in the most places, including mobile search results.
- Cut filler before keywords. Words like "high quality", "best" and "new" use characters without helping anyone search.
- Do not repeat words to fill space. Amazon's title rules allow a word no more than twice, with small exceptions such as prepositions and articles.
- Write each platform's title separately. An 80 character eBay title and a 140 character Etsy title for the same item should not be the same text cut at different points.
The product title SEO guide covers structure in more depth, and the Etsy tag generator helps with the 13 tags that go with an Etsy title. AM Jarvis Marketplace Research mines real Amazon and Etsy search suggestions and builds listings within each marketplace's limits. For longer copy, the word counter adds reading time and keyword density.