Google Ads Character Limits: What Actually Fits, and Why Your Best Line Still Gets Cut
Every Google Ads text field has a hard ceiling, and the editor will not let you save a single character over it. Headlines are 30. Descriptions are 90. Callouts and sitelink text are 25. Those are the numbers, and they have been stable for years.
Free, no signup: the AI headline generator at adcreator-ai.com/free/headline-generator writes ten Google-ready headlines and descriptions from one product page, already inside the limits — no account, no card.
The numbers are the easy part. What costs people money is the assumption underneath them: that a field is a target to fill rather than a ceiling not to hit. Below are the limits, followed by the four ways good copy gets cut that have nothing to do with your character count.
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Use the tool free →The limits, in one table
| Field | Limit | How many per ad |
|---|---|---|
| Responsive search ad headline | 30 characters | Up to 15 |
| Responsive search ad description | 90 characters | Up to 4 |
| Display path (the text after your domain) | 15 characters | 2 fields |
| Callout asset | 25 characters | Multiple |
| Sitelink text | 25 characters | Multiple |
These come from Google's own documentation for responsive search ads, sitelinks and callouts.
If you advertise in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, halve everything. Google counts every character in a double-width language as two, so a 30-character headline is really 15, and sitelink and callout text drop to 12. This catches out anyone localising a campaign by translating an English ad that already ran close to the limit — the translation will not fit, and it is not because the translator was verbose.
You are writing a pool, not an ad
A responsive search ad is not one ad with fifteen headlines. It is a pool of assets Google assembles into a different ad for each auction. Only a few of your headlines appear together at any one time, and you do not choose which.
That single fact changes how the limits should be read:
- Each headline has to make sense on its own, next to any other two. A headline that only works as the second half of a sentence will eventually be shown first.
- Near-identical headlines waste slots. Three variations of "Free Shipping" are not three assets, they are one asset with a rounding error. Google's guidance for Ad Strength explicitly asks for unique, non-repetitive assets.
- A 30-character headline is not better than a 22-character one. The ceiling is not a quality bar.
Four ways your copy gets cut anyway
1. Truncation on smaller screens. Fitting the field is not the same as fitting the ad. Long headlines that pass validation can still be shortened in the served result, and the part you lose is the end — which is exactly where people put the offer.
2. Pinning. Pinning locks a headline to a position. It is the right call for a legal disclaimer or a brand name that must lead, but every pin removes combinations from the pool, and heavy pinning quietly turns a responsive ad back into a static one. Pin what you must, not what you prefer.
3. Repetition inside the same served ad. If several headlines say the same thing in different words, Google can assemble two of them together, and the ad reads like a stutter. Vary the angle — price, proof, delivery, guarantee, use case — not the phrasing.
4. Punctuation and symbols eating the budget. An em dash surrounded by spaces costs three characters to do the job a comma does in one. Emoji and repeated exclamation marks are worse than expensive — they risk disapproval under Google's editorial policies.
How to write to 30 characters without sounding like a telegram
Thirty characters is about four to six words. The habits that survive it:
- Lead with the noun. "Waterproof Hiking Boots" beats "Boots That Are Waterproof" and saves eight characters.
- Drop the articles. "The", "a" and "an" almost never earn their space in a headline.
- Numerals, not words. "24hr Delivery" is nine characters shorter than "Twenty-Four Hour Delivery" and reads faster.
- One idea per headline. If you need a conjunction, you have two headlines.
- Keep the brand out of most of them. Your domain is already on screen. Spending 30 characters to repeat it buys nothing.
- Write descriptions to roughly 80 of the 90. It leaves room for a longer word later without a rewrite, and nothing is gained by landing exactly on 90.
The one place to spend every character you have
Descriptions. You get four, at 90 characters each, and most accounts write two and stop. Those two extra descriptions are the cheapest unused inventory in the account: each one is a different argument Google can test for you — proof, objection handling, delivery terms, guarantee — and none of them cost anything to produce.
Frequently asked
How many characters is a Google ad headline? 30 characters, and you can supply up to 15 headlines per responsive search ad. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean the effective limit is 15, because each character counts as two.
How many characters is a Google ad description? 90 characters, up to 4 per ad — 45 in double-width languages.
Do longer headlines perform better? No. The limit is a ceiling, not a target. What moves performance is how different your headlines are from each other, because that is what gives the system something to test.
What happens if my text is too long? The editor refuses to save it. Nothing is silently truncated at upload, which is why the real truncation risk is on screen, at display time, not at the point you write it.
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