Google Extends Search Results Snippets To Max 320 Characters

Dec 4, 2017 - 8:05 am 35 by

Google Snippets

Google has officially extended the search results snippets to a maximum character length of 320 characters. They confirmed with me late on Friday saying:

We recently made a change to provide more descriptive and useful snippets, to help people better understand how pages are relevant to their searches. This resulted in snippets becoming slightly longer, on average.

What are snippets? The description line under the clickable title and URL in the search results page:

Google Snippets

Danny Sullivan, now at Google, also confirmed it on Twitter:

Google is telling webmasters to not go ahead and change their meta descriptions. Danny wrote "don't go expanding your meta description tags." He said the longer snippets are "more a dynamic process" Google automatically makes based on the content on that page and your query.

How long can those snippets be? Danny said a maximum of 320 characters. I believe the example above in the screen shot is a maximum of 307 characters but it can go longer says Danny.

Google has not yet made a statement about if they have changed their commendations for writing meta descriptions. Danny referenced a previous tweet from John Mueller of Google who said not to really make changes:

We will see - but now, don't be surprised to see longer snippets. It is not just a test anymore.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Web Analytics

Google Analytics Real Time Reporting Broken Again

Jul 17, 2025 - 10:40 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 17, 2025

Jul 17, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google

Google AI Mode Gets Gemini 2.5 Pro & Deep Search For A Fee

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google

Google Discover Officially Gets AI-Generated Summaries

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

How The Google Ask For Me Feature Works & New AI Local Calling

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Tests Much Larger Favicons In Search

Jul 17, 2025 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Official: Google Local Questions & Answers Now On Desktop