How long should a title tag be in 2025?
How long should a title tag be in 2025? Optimizing title tags is very important to improving your visibility in Google’s SERPs – but no character limitation to fear. Here’s why. The title tag is among the most crucial SEO factors. It can potentially make a big difference in your rankings. In my experience, optimizing title tags can provide rankings with a big boost. There are numerous different methods to optimize a title tag. One is to ensure it is within the 55- to 60-character range (which I believe is somewhat dated today). Other SEOs advise that it is fine to have title tags of up to 70 characters (or more). There are also fears that having the title cut off in search results or reworded by Google can harm organic performance and click-through rate. This article discusses the grounds for such fears, Google’s official position regarding title length, and my observations after analyzing 10,000 title tags of Google’s SERPs. Example of title tag cut off in SERPs Technically, the character limit of a title tag Google can show in SERPs is in pixels. When your title tag is excessively long, Google can truncate it like so. The Title Tag Change and the Fallout In August of 2021, Google altered the process of generating titles in search result snippets. Google frequently displays searchers a title other than your HTML title tag. HTML title tags can be rewritten in SERPs when they are: Too long. Packed with keywords. Absent or duplicative “boilerplate” language (e.g., home pages could be labeled as “Home”). When the update was out, it brought a storm into the SEO world. Numerous SEOs reported instances where the title rewrite went “horribly wrong.” Some anecdotes received were about title tag being redirected to the URL slug. Chatter within the SEO industry also exposed a number of other incidents of Google replacing a site’s tags in the search results with other elements from the page, such as: H1 tags. Image alt texts, File names. Everything from the page from the source code of the page itslef. Their big takeaway from this update seems to be that “Google wants shorter titles in the SERPs.” That was a panic-inducing change for some folks in the SEO space leading even me to advocate for straight-up short titles instead of calls for rewrites. The Confusion Across the board, everyone understands that Google is looking for shorter titles in the SERPs. But does that mean they will use the titles that get shown in the SERPs rather than the HTML title for rankings? For this, many SEOs believe that longer titles will either be shortened or re-written by Google, and that they won’t be on the list for rankings, but rather the new title that appears in SERPs will be the one considered for rankings. What is Google’s official statement about title length? On a Search Off the Record video, John Mueller of Google requested Gary Illyes on the topic of length of title tags: “I had a question which is, perhaps, perhaps it’s a yes or no, Gary. Does there ever seem to be an advantage to having title tags which are greater in length than is displayable, and segments of it?” To which Illyes replied with a very definite and specific answer, “Yes.” He continued: “The title length, that’s an externally fabricated metrics… Technically, there’s a limit, like how long can it be anything in the page, but it’s not a small number. It’s not 160 characters or whatever– 100, 200, 20, or whatever.” And advised to: “Try to keep it accurate to the page, but I wouldn’t think too much about how long it is and whether it’s long enough or way too long. If it fills up your screen, then probably it’s too long, but if it just one sentence that fits on one line or two lines, you’re not going to get a manual action for it.” If we go back to Google’s documentation on SERPs titles (a.k.a., title links), no recommended length or character limit is mentioned for the title tag. Would longer titles affect rankings? If longer title tags can be truncated or rewritten in SERPs, wouldn’t that affect rankings? The answer is no, as per Mueller’s response during Google’s SEO Office Hours on Dec. 11, 2020. Whether your titles are truncated or rewritten in SERPs, Google still uses the HTML title tag for ranking purposes – not the visible version. I don’t think we should abbreviate titles unnecessarily. Title tag is one of the handful of ranking signals we can control outright, and I always try to utilize it to its full potential without resorting to spammy actions such as keyword stuffing. My analysis I would like to lay this argument to rest, so I proceeded and examined the titles for a randomly chosen set of 100 keywords that belong to a wide variety of categories as follows: Top of funnel (TOFU). Middle of funnel (MOFU). Bottom of funnel (BOFU). Local intent keywords. Navigational intent keywords. Niche-specific keywords. Seasonal/trending keywords. Long-tail keywords. Examples of the sorts of keywords that are: “How does solar energy work.” “What is machine learning.” “History of electric cars.” I did this for each of the 100 keywords and then checked the top 100 results for each keyword to see what their title lengths were. This is what the graph and data reveal: Position Range Average Title Length 1-10 42.2 11-20 42.9 21-30 44.2 31-40 44.4 41-50 44.1 51-60 44.3 61-70 44.5 71-80 44.4 81-90 44.8 91-100 45.8 Here’s what this data indicates, along with my experience Google appears to favor rendering shorter titles. The length of the average title in the complete sample (100 keywords × 100 URLs = 10,000 titles) is between