75 characters including spaces, from 27 July 2026, in every category except media. A new Item Highlights field gives you another 125 characters that is searchable and displays with the title. Titles still over the limit get rewritten by Amazon's AI; only brand-registered sellers get a 14-day review window.
What the change actually is
Titles are capped at 75 characters, counting spaces, in all categories except media — books, music, video and DVD, where a long descriptive title is genuinely part of the product's name. Amazon's stated reasoning is that the title should display in full on mobile, and be consistent with title lengths elsewhere in retail.
That reasoning matters more than it sounds, because it tells you what the constraint is optimising for. The 200-character format rewarded keyword stuffing, and shoppers on phones were reading a truncated fragment of it anyway. The cap is an attempt to make the visible title and the actual title the same thing.
Alongside it comes Item Highlights, a new field of up to 125 characters for materials or recommended use cases that help buyers compare options. Critically, Amazon describes it as searchable and says it appears with titles in search results and on the detail page. It is not a consolation prize — it is where the detail you cut is supposed to go.
What 75 characters actually feels like
Abstract limits are hard to judge, so here is a typical over-long title and a version that fits.
Acme Stainless Steel Insulated Water Bottle 32oz Wide Mouth Leakproof Lid BPA Free Double Wall Vacuum Flask for Gym Sports Travel Hiking Camping — Keeps Cold 24 Hours Hot 12 Hours — Blue
186 characters. Over the limit by 111.
Acme Insulated Water Bottle 32oz, Leakproof Wide Mouth, Blue
60 characters. Fifteen left over for one more attribute.
The second version keeps brand, product, size, the two attributes a buyer actually chooses on, and the variant. Everything dropped — BPA free, double wall, the six use cases, the retention hours — is exactly what Item Highlights and the bullet points exist for.
A workable priority order when you are cutting:
| Keep | Why |
|---|---|
| Brand | Conventional opener, and buyers scan for it |
| What the product is | The noun someone actually searched for |
| Size / quantity / capacity | Usually the first filter a buyer applies |
| The one differentiating attribute | Whatever makes yours the right one, not just a match |
| Variant (colour, flavour) | Required to distinguish child ASINs from each other |
And the things that reliably go: repeated synonyms, use-case lists, promotional claims, and any attribute shared by every competing product. “BPA free” on a water bottle distinguishes nothing when every listing says it.
The AI rewrite, and who gets a say
Doing nothing is a choice with a specific consequence. After 27 July, titles still over the limit are gradually rewritten by Amazon's AI. Brand-registered sellers get 14 days in the Review Listings Changes tool to review, edit or approve the rewrite before it goes live. Sellers without Brand Registry do not get that window — the rewrite simply happens.
This is the sharpest practical split in the whole change. If you are not brand-registered, an algorithm that has never seen your conversion data decides which of your attributes survives. It may well produce a clean title; it has no way of knowing that “wide mouth” is the phrase your buyers search and “double wall” is not.
With a large catalogue you will not hand-write everything before the deadline, and you do not need to. Sort by revenue, rewrite the top listings yourself where the wrong cut costs real money, and let the AI take the long tail. Reviewing a rewrite is about as much effort as writing one, so spend that effort where it pays.
A note on word and symbol rules
You will find a lot of confident advice listing banned promotional words, forbidden capitalisation and prohibited symbols for Amazon titles. Some of it is sound convention. Some of it is repetition of guidance Amazon has never published as a definitive list.
The 27 July announcement covers the character limits and Item Highlights; for wording it points sellers to the general product title requirements. So avoiding promotional claims, ALL CAPS runs and decorative characters like ★ or 【 】 is sensible and widely advised — but treat it as convention to judge, not a rule to obey blindly, and check your own category's style guide in Seller Central before deleting a word that legitimately describes your product. Our Amazon 75-Character Title Checker flags those patterns as advisory warnings rather than errors for exactly this reason.
Frequently asked questions
Does the brand name count toward the 75 characters?
Yes. The limit covers the whole title string, and titles conventionally open with the brand. A fifteen-character brand plus a space leaves you 59 characters for everything else, so sellers with long brand names have meaningfully less room than sellers without. There is no exemption for it.
If I shorten my title, do I lose the rankings the removed words earned?
Nobody outside Amazon can tell you precisely, and be sceptical of anyone who claims otherwise — this is the part of the change with the least published detail. What is confirmed is that Item Highlights is searchable and displays alongside the title, and that backend search terms is a separate field unaffected by this change. So relocate removed terms rather than deleting them — our guide to Amazon's listing character limits lists how much room each of those fields actually gives you, and the Amazon Listing Limit Checker counts what you paste into that 250-byte backend field in bytes rather than characters, which is where the room usually runs out sooner than expected.
Should I rewrite before the deadline or let Amazon's AI do it?
Rewrite the titles that matter yourself, and let the AI handle the tail if your catalogue is large. The review window only exists for brand-registered sellers, so without Brand Registry a rewrite goes live unapproved. Even with it, reviewing a rewrite is roughly as much work as writing one — and the AI does not know which attribute drives your conversions.
How do variations and parent-child listings work under the limit?
Each child ASIN carries its own title and its own 75 characters, and the variation attribute usually has to live inside it. That is where the cap bites hardest: a title carrying both a size and a colour spends fifteen or more characters on the variant alone. In a wide variation family, shorten the shared descriptive part once and consistently rather than optimising each child separately.
Which categories are exempt?
Media only — books, music, video and DVD, where the long descriptive title is part of the product's actual name. Amazon's announcement does not carve out further exceptions, so if you sell in a category you are unsure about, check that category's listing requirements in Seller Central rather than assuming an exemption exists.
Now that the date has passed, the follow-on questions are field mechanics rather than editing choices — what Item Highlights actually holds, what the automatic rewrite does with your content, and how to correct one. Those are covered in After Amazon's Title Cap: Where the Cut Words Go.
Selling the same products on Etsy? The title rules there are different again — our Etsy Title & Tag Counter covers the 140-character title and all 13 tags.
Facts verified 2026-07-20, seven days before the change took effect.
Source: Amazon Seller Central, “Updates to improve your product titles begin on July 27”. Note what is not stated there: Amazon has not published a definitive list of banned words, capitalisation rules or prohibited symbols for titles, and has not published detail on how shortening a title affects existing search ranking. Claims you see about either are inference rather than policy, and this guide does not repeat them.