YouTube titles stop at 100 characters

The counter above measures your text against YouTube's 100-character title cap, the field that decides whether anyone clicks. Descriptions get 5,000 characters, and the same box shows how much of one lands above the fold.

Everything runs in your browser. Paste an unpublished title without it touching a server.

YouTube splits its limits across two fields and the counter measures the tighter one. A video title caps at 100 characters and a description at 5,000. The title is the field that decides whether anyone clicks, so it carries most of the weight even though it has one twentieth of the room.

One hundred characters is a ceiling, not a target. Search results, the sidebar, and mobile home feeds all clip titles well before 100, and where they clip depends on the surface. Front-load the specific words someone would type to find the video, and leave branding at the end where losing it to truncation costs you nothing.

Descriptions get roughly 125 characters above the Show more fold on the watch page. That space should hold the one-line summary and the single link you most want clicked. Chapters, timestamps, affiliate disclosures, and credits belong below it, where length costs nothing and YouTube still indexes every word.

Hashtags behave unusually here. YouTube accepts up to 60 in a description, but only the first three surface above the video title, and a video carrying more than 15 has all of its hashtags ignored. A wall of tags is genuinely worse than none. Channel descriptions are a separate 1,000-character field with its own job, which is telling a new visitor what the channel publishes and how often.