Most SEO advice repeats the same numbers: keep your title tag under 60 characters, your meta description under 160. Those numbers are useful shortcuts, but they're not the actual rule Google uses -- and if you've ever seen a 58-character title get chopped off in search results while a 61-character one didn't, you've already run into the gap.
The real limit is pixels, not characters
Google truncates search snippets based on the rendered pixel width of the title and description, not a fixed character count. A title full of narrow letters like "i," "l," and "t" fits more characters before hitting the cutoff than a title full of wide letters like "W," "M," and capital letters generally. That's why the 60/160 guidance is a reasonable average, not a hard boundary -- it assumes typical character widths, and your actual title might deviate from that average in either direction.
Why this trips people up in practice
If you write a title, count the characters, confirm it's under 60, and still see it truncated with "..." in search results, the character count wasn't the problem -- the pixel width was. This is especially common with titles that lean on capital letters, numbers, or brand names in all caps, since those tend to run wider per character than lowercase text.
The flip side also happens: a title a few characters over the "limit" might display in full if it's made up of narrow characters. Neither outcome means the rule of thumb is wrong -- it means the rule of thumb was always an approximation standing in for something Google doesn't publish an exact number for.
What actually matters when you're writing one
Since you can't perfectly predict pixel width without seeing a rendered preview, the practical approach is to write your title and description, then look at how they'd actually display -- not just count characters in a text editor. Front-load the important keywords and information in case of truncation, and don't rely on the tail end of a long title to carry meaning, since that's the part most likely to get cut.
It's also worth remembering that Google sometimes rewrites your title or description entirely in the snippet, pulling from on-page content instead of your tags, if it decides your version doesn't match the query well. Length isn't the only thing being judged -- relevance is too.
Check length across more than just Google
If you're publishing the same title and description to social platforms as well as search, each one enforces its own limits -- Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and email subject lines all cut off at different points, and none of them match Google's.
The SEO Character Counter checks your title and description against all of those limits at once, and the SERP Preview Tool shows roughly how the result would render in Google search, truncation included, so you're not just trusting a character count.