Amazon just cut product titles to 75 characters. Google shows about 60. An AI answer gives you a clause. Here is what survives the cut on each one, and how to check your own.
You Have Never Had to Choose What to Cut
There was always room for one more sentence. Another bullet on the product page, another paragraph on the About page, a longer headline if the first one did not fit.
That room is closing on every surface at once, and most owners have not checked what makes it through.
Last week Amazon made it concrete. On July 27, product titles dropped to 75 characters across every category except media, down from 200. Amazon’s stated reason is that long titles get cut off on phones anyway, so the limit now matches what a shopper actually sees. They added a second field, Item Highlights, worth another 125 characters, written as comma separated phrases rather than sentences.
If you sell on Amazon, that is a real project. If you do not, the number still matters, because Amazon is the last major platform to do this, not the first.
What You Actually Get, Surface by Surface
| Where you show up | What you get | Hard limit or just hidden? |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon product title | 75 characters | Hard limit, enforced since July 27, 2026 |
| Amazon Item Highlights | 125 characters, comma separated phrases | Hard limit, new field |
| Google search result title | Roughly the first 50 to 60 characters | Hidden. Google measures pixel width, about 580 to 600px, so there is no exact character number |
| Google search ad headline | 30 characters, each | Hard limit |
| Google search ad description | 90 characters, each | Hard limit |
| Facebook or Instagram ad, main text | About 125 characters before “See more” | Hidden. The field accepts thousands. It just stops showing them |
| Facebook or Instagram ad headline | About 40 characters | Hidden |
| Email subject line on a phone | Somewhere around 30 to 40 characters | Hidden, and it varies by app |
| An AI answer | A clause inside a list of other companies | Neither. See below |
Two things are worth pulling out of that table.
The “hidden” rows are the dangerous ones. A hard limit tells you the truth immediately. You paste in 90 characters, the field rejects it, you deal with it. A hidden limit accepts everything you wrote, shows you the full version in your own admin panel, and quietly serves a shortened one to customers. You never see the version your customer sees. That is why most businesses have a message they believe is working and a message that is actually running.
The AI row is a different problem. Everywhere else, you get a shortened version of something you wrote. In an AI answer you get whatever the system decided you are, in roughly eight words, sitting beside four competitors. You did not write it, you cannot cut it down yourself, and if you are left out entirely, nothing notifies you.
Go Look at What Survived
Here is the exercise. Open your own listings and pages, look at what is visible before the cut on each one, and write down what made it through.
For most businesses it is the category and the location.
Plumbing Services in Portsmouth NH
Leather Office Chair, Black, Adjustable, Ergonomic
Both accurate. Both completely interchangeable with every competitor in the results next to them.
What almost never survives is the reason someone should choose you. The twenty years in business, the same crew on every job, the warranty nobody else offers, the fact that you answer the phone. That material exists. You paid someone to write it. It sits in the second half of the sentence, on the second line, or three paragraphs down a page nobody scrolls.
This Is Not Really About Character Counts
If your one line is clear, none of these limits are a constraint. You were only ever going to need the first six words.
The limits only hurt when the message was never prioritized in the first place, because a truncation is just a forced ranking. The platform cuts at 60 characters and keeps whatever you happened to put first. If you never decided what came first, the platform decided for you, and it decided badly, because it does not know which half was the important one.
So the real question underneath all of this is not how many characters you get. It is whether the first line of every surface you own says the same thing, and whether that thing is a reason to buy.
Want Us to Take That Read?
We run the analysis before any conversation about working together, and if we don’t see a path, we’ll tell you that too.
👉 Request an Opportunity ReviewIs Your Website Structured for This?
Most are not, and it is rarely because someone made a bad decision. It is because the site was built to be read top to bottom by someone already interested, and that is not how anybody arrives anymore.
Four things worth checking on your own site:
- Your page titles. Every page has one, most were written years ago, and plenty still read “Home” or “Services | Company Name.” That is the line Google shows. Check what is in the first 60 characters of the pages that matter, and check whether the important word is in there or sitting after the pipe.
- Your first sentence, on every page. Not the hero image, the first actual sentence. If it describes the company rather than the reader’s problem, it is doing nothing for you and it is what gets pulled into search summaries and AI answers.
- Whether the page states plainly what you do and who you serve. Systems that summarize you can only work with what you published. Vague, aspirational, or clever copy gives them nothing to repeat except your category. A plain sentence gives them something specific.
- Whether the same message is on all of it. Pull up your homepage title, your top product or service page, your last ad, and your Google Business Profile description side by side. If they lead with four different things, none of them is establishing anything, and you are spreading four messages across four surfaces that each only show one line.
What to Do When the Answer Is No
If the checks above came back badly, the fix is not a rewrite of everything. It is deciding what your one line is, once, and then making every surface lead with it. That order matters. Rewriting titles before you have settled the message just produces shorter versions of the same problem.
That decision is harder than it sounds, and it is usually where the real issue turns up. Most of the time the message is unclear on the page because it has not been settled internally. Three people in the business would answer “why should someone pick us” three different ways, and every surface reflects a different one of those answers.
That is worth naming out loud before anyone touches a title tag.
Not Sure Where to Begin?
Start with whichever surface sends you the most business, and only that one. Get its first line right, then copy that line everywhere else. Doing one properly beats doing eight halfway, and it gives you something to compare the rest against.
If you would rather not start from a blank page, this is genuinely hard to do from inside your own business. You know what you meant to say, so you read it into copy that does not actually say it. Everyone who has worked there more than a year does the same thing.
That is the one real advantage an outside read has. We do not know what you meant. We only see what is there, which is exactly the position your customer is in.
If you want us to take that read, we will go through what is actually visible across your site, your listings, and your ads, and tell you what we find. Sometimes it is the message. Sometimes the message is fine and something else is costing you, and we will say that instead.
Either way, go read your own first line today. It takes five minutes and most owners are surprised by what is missing from it.
Want More Insights Like This?
From Amazon to SEO to AI visibility to paid ads, we break down what’s actually working every week, no fluff and no filler. Sign up for the newsletter and get practical insights like this delivered straight to your inbox.
👉 Sign Up for the Newsletter