What gets counted
- Characters are counted the way you see them: an emoji like 👍🏽 or a flag like 🇨🇦 counts as one character, even though it's stored as several code points. Many counters get this wrong.
- Bytes is the size of the text in UTF-8, the encoding used by the web, databases and most files. It's what matters for byte limits in forms, APIs and databases. English letters take one byte; other characters take two to four.
- Words are runs of characters separated by spaces, tabs or line breaks.
- Unique words ignores upper and lower case, so "The" and "the" count once.
Common length limits
Handy when writing to a limit: a page title should stay under about 60 characters to show in full in search results, a meta description under about 155, an SMS is 160 characters (70 if it contains emoji or non-Latin letters), and a post on X is 280.