Character Limits That Matter in 2026
Nearly every platform counts spaces, punctuation, and emoji toward its limit — which is why writers get caught out when a "short" message won't send. The big ones to know: X (Twitter) allows 280 characters per post for standard accounts, with every link counted as a flat 23 characters. Instagram captions can run to 2,200 characters, but only the first ~125 show before the "more" fold, so front-load your hook. A single SMS segment is 160 characters — go over and your message is billed as two. For SEO, Google truncates meta descriptions around 155–160 characters and title tags around 60. LinkedIn posts cap at 3,000 characters with roughly 210 visible before the fold.
The checker above tracks all of these live and turns red when you cross a limit. Need word counts, reading time, or sentence stats instead? The main word counter shows everything at once, and the word count chart lists every platform limit in one citable table.
Counting With or Without Spaces
Most platform limits count spaces. The "without spaces" figure matters in a few specific cases: some translation and transcription services bill per character excluding spaces, some academic abstracts specify limits without spaces, and typists sometimes use it to compute keystrokes. When a limit doesn't say which rule applies, assume spaces count — that's the default everywhere from X to Google Ads.