The reason these tables disagree is structural rather than careless. Amazon does not have one set of field limits. It has a set per product type per marketplace, delivered as a machine-readable schema, and layered on top of that are separate display truncations and enforcement thresholds that behave like limits without being limits. A page that prints a single number for “bullet points” has already lost the information you needed.
So rather than add a fifth table, this page sorts the numbers by how well they can be checked, and then shows you the two places your own category's real ceiling is written down. Grade A is published by Amazon with a date. Grade B is consistent everywhere but not on a page you can open. Grade C is where the tables fight, and where you should stop reading the internet and go look at your own account.
A
Published, dated, checkable
Stated by Amazon on a page a seller can read, with a known effective date.
Product title75 characters
Including spaces, in every category except media, in force since 27 July 2026. This one is unusually well evidenced because Amazon announced it in the seller forums with a date attached and then answered questions about it in public. It replaced the 200-character allowance that most published tables still quote, so a table naming 200 is not merely imprecise now — it is describing a rule that no longer exists. The rule itself and how to choose what survives the cut is a separate read.
Item Highlights125 characters
The field introduced alongside the title cap, described by Amazon as an additional 125 characters for materials and recommended use cases, searchable and displayed with titles in search results. New enough that most limit tables have not absorbed it at all. Amazon has stated that leaving it blank does not leave it unused — content is generated from your existing listing attributes — which makes it the one field on this page where the interesting question is not the number.
B
Reported consistently, not publicly published
Every source agrees, but the underlying Amazon page is behind a Seller Central sign-in.
Backend search terms250 bytes
The most reliable Grade B number on the list. Amazon documents it in Seller Central help under “Use search terms effectively”, which requires a sign-in, so the figure is reproduced everywhere and verifiable by nobody without an account. Two things about it are worth more than the number itself. It is measured in bytes, not characters, so an accented letter costs two and an emoji three or four. And the documented failure mode is all-or-nothing: exceed the limit and the field is not truncated, it is not indexed. There is no error message, which is why sellers can carry a dead keyword field for a year. Our listing limit checker counts the byte length rather than the character length for this reason, and works through a Spanish example where 245 characters cost 260 bytes.
C
Contested — go and look at your own
Reputable sources give different numbers because the answer genuinely varies.
Bullet points200 / 255 / 500 ?
The canonical example of a limit that is really three different things wearing the same name. There is a schema maximum, which varies by product type. There is a vendor-versus-seller difference, with the lower figures usually describing the vendor side. And there is a mobile display truncation, which is where the “keep each bullet under 200” advice comes from — that is a legibility recommendation, not a ceiling, and it is repeated so often that it has been promoted to a rule by accident.
The practical consequence: a number you found on a blog can be simultaneously too high for your category and too low for your neighbour's. This is the field where the lookup routes below actually change your answer.
Product description2,000 characters ?
Widely reported at 2,000, with variation by category, and complicated further by brand-registered sellers replacing the field with A+ content entirely. Treat the figure as an order of magnitude and check the template.
Weekly new-ASIN allowancenot published
Included here because it gets filed under “Amazon listing limits” and is a completely different mechanism — an account-level throttle on how many new ASINs you may create, unrelated to how long your text is. Amazon does not publish a starting figure, and the numbers quoted in forums are extrapolations from individual accounts. Anyone printing a specific number is inventing precision. The listing limit checker's page separates the three unrelated things called a limit if that is the wall you are standing in front of.
Where your own authoritative number is written down
Both routes below give you a per-product-type, per-marketplace answer, which is the only kind of answer that exists. Neither requires a developer.
Route one · ten minutes · no technical setup
The inventory file template for your product type
Download the flat-file listing template for the exact category you sell in, from the inventory tools in Seller Central. The workbook contains several tabs, and the one nobody opens is the Data Definitions tab: a column-by-column reference giving the field's definition, whether it is required, and its maximum length. The sibling Valid Values tab does the same job for controlled fields like colour and size, where the constraint is a list rather than a length.
This is the number that governs your listing, for your category, on that marketplace, on the day you downloaded it. It costs one download and it settles every Grade C argument above for your own case. Tab names have varied slightly between template generations, so look for the definitions sheet rather than an exact label.
Route two · for anyone listing by feed or API
The product type definition schema
Amazon publishes the requirements for each product type as a JSON schema through the Product Type Definitions API, and the schema carries the constraints directly — a maxLength on each string attribute. If you list through a channel manager or your own integration, this is the object your submissions are validated against, so it is the limit in the most literal sense available.
One detail in Amazon's own meta-schema documentation is worth carrying away even if you never call the API: maxLength is defined as a maximum measured in UTF-8 bytes. Not characters.
The bytes-versus-characters point almost everyone states backwards
The usual summary is that Amazon counts titles and bullets in characters and backend search terms in bytes. As a description of what the Seller Central form does in front of you, that is right, and it is why our own counter behaves that way. As a description of the system underneath, it is a simplification: the schema that validates listing submissions expresses its string limits as byte lengths throughout.
For English ASCII copy the distinction is invisible, because one character is one byte and the two numbers are the same. It stops being invisible the moment your text contains anything else — an umlaut, an accent, a curly apostrophe pasted in from a word processor, a degree symbol, an emoji. Each of those costs two, three or four bytes while looking like one character on screen. A seller writing German or Spanish copy and submitting it by feed can therefore be rejected at a length their character counter says is fine.
Marked as unverified: we have not been able to confirm from a publicly readable Amazon page whether the Seller Central web form applies the same byte-based measurement to titles and bullets as the schema does, or a character-based one of its own. The safe assumption if you write in a language with accented characters is that your real headroom is smaller than a character count suggests — and the way to settle it is to paste your text into your own listing form and watch where it stops you.
Four different things that happen when you go over
Worth separating, because they are diagnosed differently and because only one of them tells you anything.
- The form refuses to save. The friendliest outcome. You have hit a hard field limit and you know it immediately.
- A feed or API submission errors. Equally clear, and the error usually names the attribute and the constraint, which makes it the fastest way to discover a Grade C number for your own product type.
- It saves and gets truncated later. Common with display limits rather than storage limits: the text is intact in your listing and cut off on a phone. Nothing is broken; something is invisible.
- It saves and is silently ignored. The 250-byte backend field is the documented case, and it is the expensive one, because a listing in this state looks completely healthy. Nothing surfaces it except counting.
Which is the honest argument for counting before you paste rather than after. The character and byte counter exists for the fourth case specifically; the 75-character title checker handles the field that changed last week; and if you are rewriting rather than measuring, where the detail cut out of a title is supposed to land is the part no counter can tell you.
When to re-check
Field limits are not the kind of thing to look up once. Re-download the template when you list into a new category, when you open a new marketplace, and after any announced listing change — the July 2026 title cap invalidated a number that had been stable and correct for years, and every table that had cached it became wrong on the same morning. A downloaded template is dated by definition; a blog table, including this one, is dated only by how recently someone remembered to edit it.
Facts current as of 2026-07-28. Grade A items were verified against Amazon's own seller-forum announcements; Grade B and C items are described with their evidence quality stated rather than presented as settled.
Primary sources: Amazon Seller Central, “Updates to improve your product titles begin on July 27” and the accompanying Q&A thread — the 75-character title cap, the media exemption and the 125-character Item Highlights field;
the Item Highlights field thread — Amazon's statement that a blank field is populated from existing attributes.
The maxLength definition is from Amazon's developer documentation for the Product Type Definitions meta-schema, which states that the keyword defines a maximum string length measured in UTF-8 bytes, and the Product Type Definitions API use-case guide.
The 250-byte backend search-term limit is documented in Seller Central help (“Use search terms effectively”), which requires a sign-in and is therefore graded B here rather than A. Flat-file template tab contents are described from the templates themselves and from consistent third-party documentation; tab naming has varied between template generations.