Character Limits for Social, Search and Ads

Because they answer different questions. The limit is what the field will accept before it refuses or cuts your text. The cut-off is where the interface stops showing it and puts a more link in its place, which on Facebook and LinkedIn happens thousands of characters before the cap. The cut-off is the number worth writing to.

No, there is not. Google fills a box of a fixed pixel width, roughly 920 on desktop, and cuts whatever does not fit. The familiar figure of 155 characters is an average derived from ordinary lowercase text, so a description set in wide letters or capitals is cut well before it, and one set in narrow letters survives past it. The same is true of the title tag.

Every link costs 23 characters whatever its real length, because all of them are wrapped through the t.co shortener - a long tracking URL costs no more than a short one. Most emoji count as two characters. Bluesky counts graphemes instead, so an emoji is one character there.

Each row carries the month it was last checked, rather than one date for the whole page. Instagram and TikTok change more often than Google Ads does, and a single page-level date would say nothing useful about the rows that have not been looked at in a year.

It counts every character in the field, spaces and punctuation included, which is what the platforms count too. The exceptions are the ones noted above: X substitutes 23 characters for each link and counts most emoji as two, so a post full of links will measure shorter on X than it does here.

Because the table alone makes you do the arithmetic. Paste the text once and every limit is measured against it at the same time, which is the actual question you had: not what the Instagram limit is, but whether this caption fits it.