Google rewrote your title. Here's why.
You wrote a title tag, and Google shows something else in the results. It feels arbitrary, but it isn't random. Google documents the reasons it replaces titles, and most of them are fixable in the title itself.
Where Google gets the title
Google calls the clickable headline in a result the title link. Its page on influencing your title links says generating it is completely automated, and your <title> element is only one source. The others include the main visual title on the page, heading elements like <h1>, og:title meta tags, other large and prominent text, anchor text on the page, the text of links pointing to the page, and WebSite structured data.
The title tag is still the usual winner. When Google changed the system in August 2021, it said HTML titles were used more than 80% of the time. If yours is being replaced, check it against the list below before blaming the algorithm.
The causes Google lists
The documentation names the common issues that lead it to adjust a title link:
- Half-empty titles. Part of the title is missing. Google's example is a title of just
| Site Name, which it shows as "Product Name | Site Name", filling the gap from the page. That's what a template produces when the product or post name field is empty. - Obsolete titles. A page is reused year after year for recurring information, and the title still says last year. In Google's example the title says 2020 admissions criteria while the visible title on the page says 2021, and Google uses the year from the visible title.
- Inaccurate titles. The title doesn't reflect what the page is about.
- Micro-boilerplate. A group of pages repeat the same title text. Google's example is three season pages for a TV show, all titled with only the show name, which it tells apart by adding "Season 1", "Season 2" and "Season 3" from the page.
- No clear main title. There's more than one large, prominent heading, and it isn't clear which is the main one.
- Language or script mismatch. The title is in a different language or writing system from the page's main content.
The 2021 post adds the obvious offenders: titles that are very long, stuffed with keywords, missing entirely, or generic boilerplate like a homepage titled "Home".
About length
There's no character count to hit. Google's documentation says there's no limit on how long a <title> element can be, and that title links are truncated as needed, usually to fit the device width. But the 2021 post includes very long titles among the ones its system may rework, sometimes by picking the most relevant part. A title that says what the page is in its first few words still makes sense when it gets cut off.
The fix
Google's best practices, plus the causes above, come down to a short checklist:
- Describe the page, briefly. Google asks for descriptive, concise titles and no keyword stuffing.
- Match the page. Your title and your
<h1>should say the same thing in close to the same words, and there should be one main heading. If they disagree, the heading is right there for Google to use instead. - Fill every template field. Look for pages whose title is just your site name or starts with a separator. Those are half-empty titles.
- Keep years current, or drop them. If the page is updated every year, update the title with it.
- Make similar pages distinct. Put the part that differs (the season, the city, the model) in the title, not only the shared name.
- Brand once. Google suggests your site name at the start or end, separated by a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon or pipe. The homepage is a reasonable place to say a little more about the site.
- Put it in the server HTML. A title set by JavaScript is invisible to crawlers that don't run it, which is what we found testing an SEO pixel.
To see what your page actually sends, run it through Meta & Social Preview (my own product). It shows your Google snippet and share card built from the page's raw HTML, and lists any missing tags.