How to write a product title that fits
A product title has two readers and they want different things. A search index wants the words a shopper would type, arranged so it can tell what the product is. A person scrolling a results page wants to identify the product in about a second and skip it if it is not what they need. A title that satisfies only one of them is either invisible or unhelpful, and most titles fail the second one while obsessing over the first.
The order that survives being cut
Titles get truncated. On a phone, Amazon shows roughly the first 45 to 90 characters; Google Shopping shows about 70 of its 150; Etsy shows about 50 of its 140. Whatever you put at the end may never be seen by anyone. So the title should be written so that the first part is complete on its own, and each thing you add afterwards is a bonus rather than a load-bearing part.
The order that works, and which Amazon's own guidance describes in almost these terms:
- Brand — first, because a shopper searching for a brand expects to see it immediately, and because it is the one word that cannot be guessed from the rest.
- Product type — what it is, in the words a shopper would use. "Kitchen Knife Set", not "Culinary Implement Collection".
- The differentiating attribute — the one thing that separates this from the other eleven results on the page. Material, capacity, power, count.
- The variation — size, colour, pack count. Last, because the shopper only needs it after deciding the first three are right, and because it is the most mechanical part to cut.
This ordering has a useful property: if the title gets cut after the third element, it is still a complete and accurate description. A title built the other way round — features first, brand last — degrades into a fragment of adjectives.
What changed on Amazon in July 2026
Amazon reduced the product title from 200 characters to 75 for all categories except media, effective 27 July 2026, and introduced a second field called Item Highlights with a 125-character limit. Together they make up the old 200-character budget, split in two, and Amazon says both fields are used for search.
Two consequences matter operationally. Listings that exceed the limit have been getting rewritten by Amazon's own AI, and only Brand Registry owners get a 14-day window to review the change; everyone else discovers it afterwards, on a live listing. And the division of labour is now explicit rather than a matter of taste:
| Belongs in the title | Belongs in Item Highlights |
|---|---|
| Brand; product type; the most important differentiating attribute; critical variation information such as size or pack count; model number where relevant | Material; secondary features; recommended use; compatibility details; anything that would have been squeezed into the tail of the old 200-character title |
Amazon asks for Item Highlights to be written as comma-separated phrases rather than sentences. It is a keyword field with a human-readable surface, not a paragraph.
How the marketplaces differ
| Where | Limit | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon item name | 75 | Since 27 July 2026, media categories excluded. Phone views show roughly 45 to 90 characters. |
| Amazon Item Highlights | 125 | The companion field. Also indexed, so it is a keyword opportunity rather than an overflow bin. |
| Amazon bullet points | ~256 each | Varies by category; Amazon also recommends keeping all five bullets under a combined 1,000 characters. |
| eBay | 80 | A paid 55-character subtitle sits alongside it, which makes eBay effectively roomier than the bare number suggests. |
| Etsy | 140 | Tags are a separate allowance: 13 tags of 20 characters each. Title and tags are read together. |
| Walmart | 150 | Long titles are truncated in the listing view, and Walmart asks for size and count in the title. |
| Google Shopping | 150 | About 70 characters are typically read. The feed wants size and colour in the title as well as in the attributes. |
| Your own site | 255 | No marketplace cap, but a search result shows about 60 characters, which is what most visitors will ever see. |
The practical consequence is that a single title cannot serve all of them, and pretending otherwise means writing to the shortest limit and wasting space everywhere else, or writing to the longest and being cut on the shortest. Pick a primary marketplace, write to its limit, and keep a shorter and a longer variant on hand for the others.
Keywords without stuffing
The instinct when a title is too short to hold everything is to compress the keywords in — and it makes the title worse. Three rules cover most of it.
One primary phrase. Decide the single phrase a buyer would type, and use it once, in the position where it does most good: after the brand and before the variations. A phrase repeated three times does not rank three times better; it just crowds out the attributes that make someone click.
Natural variants, not permutations. "Knife set" and "kitchen knife set" can both appear because they read naturally. "Knife, knives, knife set, knife sets" cannot — it reads as spam to a human and adds nothing a search index needs.
Every character should carry information. The test for each word is whether removing it would make the title less accurate. "Premium", "High Quality" and "Best" fail that test; they describe nothing, they occupy the characters that a material or a pack count could use, and platform guidelines name them as promotional language.
Three rewrites
1. Too long, and shouting
Premium Stainless Steel Kitchen Knife Set 5 Piece with Ergonomic Handle and Gift Box FREE SHIPPING BEST SELLER
108 characters, two promotional phrases, two all-caps words, and the words that actually distinguish the product — five pieces, stainless steel, gift box — buried in the middle where a truncation would cut them off.
Acme 5 Piece Stainless Steel Kitchen Knife Set
47 characters. Brand first, product type clear, count and material kept. The ergonomic handle and the gift box move to Item Highlights, where "ergonomic handle, dishwasher safe, gift box included" costs nothing.
2. Keyword stuffed
Knife Set Knife Steel Knife Handle Knife Blade Kitchen Knife Sets for Kitchen
Every word is a keyword and the result says almost nothing. The word "knife" appears five times; a shopper skimming past learns only that it is a knife. Search indexes discount repetition and the reading experience is bad.
Acme Kitchen Knife Set, 5 Piece Stainless Steel, Black
58 characters. The phrase appears once, the differentiating attributes occupy the space the repetition was wasting, and the colour is where variation details belong.
3. Under the limit, and wasting it
Acme Knife Set
14 characters out of 75. Being under the limit is not automatically good — the title is the strongest piece of text on the listing, and leaving 61 characters unused means the product competes with less information than it could. There is no penalty for using the space you have.
Acme Kitchen Knife Set, 5 Piece Stainless Steel Blade, Black
62 characters. Material, count and colour added, all of them things a shopper compares on, and still comfortably inside the limit with room to trim a word if a marketplace counts differently.
What gets a listing suppressed, not just cut
Length is the least dangerous rule. These are the ones that cause a listing to be taken down or rewritten:
- Promotional language — "free shipping", "best seller", "hot item", "money back", "100% guaranteed". Named explicitly in marketplace guidelines and not matched by search anyway.
- Contact details — an email address, a web address or a phone number. Routing a buyer off the marketplace is one of the fastest routes to suppression.
- Characters some platforms reject — the angled brackets, braces, backslash, caret, tilde and pipe. These can fail an entire feed import rather than just one listing.
- Subjective claims — "#1", "best on the market", "guaranteed results". Not verifiable, therefore not allowed.
- All-caps — a shouted word reads as promotional. Title style is a capital first letter per word, and common acronyms such as USB and LED are of course exempt.
- Other brands' names — using a competitor's trademark to attract its searches is the definition of keyword spamming on every serious marketplace.
Paste a title and see the count, the remaining characters and a word-boundary truncation for each marketplace at once, plus a scan for the phrasing that gets listings suppressed.
Checklist
- Brand first, product type second, differentiating attribute third, variations last.
- Would the title still be accurate and useful if it were cut at the third element?
- Does every word carry information? Delete anything that fails the test.
- Is the primary phrase used once rather than repeated?
- Have you used the whole limit rather than leaving a third of it empty?
- Is the material, the secondary features and the recommended use in Item Highlights rather than crammed into the title?
- No promotional phrases, no contact details, no rejected characters, no subjective claims?
- Checked against the limit for your primary marketplace, and a saved shorter variant for the others?
Frequently asked
What is the Amazon product title character limit?
75 characters for every category except media, effective 27 July 2026, down from 200. Amazon also added Item Highlights, a 125-character field that is also used for search, so the total content budget is unchanged — it is just split across two fields now.
Should the title be written for search or for people?
Both, and the ordering solves the conflict. Search needs the words present, so put the phrase a buyer would type early. People need to identify the product instantly, so put the attributes that distinguish it immediately after. Promotional adjectives serve neither and are the first thing to remove.
Does repeating a keyword help ranking?
Repetition is discounted, and it displaces the attributes that would earn a click. A title using its phrase once and spending the rest of its characters on material, size and count outperforms one that repeats the phrase and says little else.
How do I check a title against several marketplaces?
Because the limits differ by a factor of three, the useful check is the one that shows all of them simultaneously and gives you a truncation that does not cut mid-word. That is what the checker does: it counts against each marketplace's limit, shows how much room is left, and displays the word-boundary version for any limit you exceed.
Why was my title rewritten automatically?
On Amazon, listings still exceeding 75 characters have been replaced with an AI-generated compliant title. Brand Registry owners get a 14-day window to review the change. The reliable way to avoid it is to check the length before publishing rather than after.