Listing complianceAmazon26 August 2026
Amazon cut product titles to 75 characters and moved the overflow into a new field. The rule is already live, the rollout is gradual, and an untouched listing today is not a compliant one. It is one the rollout has not reached yet.
The rule took effect 27 July 2026. Amazon is rolling out AI-generated replacement titles gradually, so if your titles look normal this morning that tells you nothing about whether they are compliant.
What actually changed
Amazon split the old single title field in two. The title got much shorter, and a new field absorbed what used to live at the end of it.
Title — all categories except Media (books, music, video)
75 characters maxItem Highlights — new field, one block of text, not bullets. Materials, sizes, compatibility, use cases.
125 charactersCombined space Amazon indexes for search across both fields
~200 charactersSame word repeated in a title (articles, prepositions and conjunctions exempt)
2× maximumSpecial characters
Not allowed! $ ? _ { } ^unless part of the brand namePromotional language (“bestseller”, “free shipping”, “on sale”), prices, item condition
Not allowed
The repetition, special-character and promotional rules are not new. They arrived with the January 2025 update. The 75-character cap and Item Highlights are what is new in 2026.
How Amazon enforces it
This is the part worth understanding properly, because it is not what most sellers assume.
It is not a truncation
Amazon does not chop the title at character 75. It generates a new title, built from your existing listing content, backend search terms and its own relevance signals, and generates Item Highlights alongside it. The output is Amazon's wording, not yours.
- 10 Jun 2026
Announced
Amazon publishes the new title requirements and the Item Highlights field.
- 27 Jul 2026
Rule takes effect
Non-compliant titles start being replaced with AI-generated versions. The rollout is gradual: some listings change within days, others sit untouched for weeks.
- Now
Thirty days into the rollout
Listings stay active throughout. The question is no longer whether to act before a deadline. It is whether you write the replacement titles or accept the ones Amazon generates.
- +14 days
The review window, Brand Registry only
Brand-registered sellers get 14 days in Review Listing Changes in Seller Central to approve, edit or reject each suggestion. No response means Amazon applies its version. Sellers without Brand Registry get no review step at all: changes are applied directly and can only be seen afterwards in View Change History.
Check your Brand Registry status before anything else
It decides which of those two paths applies to you. Enrolled, and you get 14 days to approve or reject every rewrite. Not enrolled, and your titles are rewritten with no review and no notification.
What it does to your search traffic
Moving keywords out of the title and into Item Highlights does not demote them. Amazon has stated in the Seller Central forums that item name and item highlights are both search inputs, and that neither is prioritised over the other.
The risk is not relocation. It is omission.
If Amazon's rewrite drops a term from both fields, it stops being indexed. The effect shows up in traffic several weeks later rather than immediately, which is what makes it hard to attribute when it happens.
The second risk is conversion. Shoppers on mobile read roughly the first 75 characters before deciding whether to tap, so whatever the rewrite chooses to lead with is now doing all the work.
Audit your own catalog first
Before deciding anything, you need three numbers. They take an inventory export and a spreadsheet to produce.
How many titles are over 75 characters
Scope of the jobMedian overshoot, in characters
How much gets cutWhich phrases sit in the final third of your titles
What you stand to lose
That third one is the one sellers skip and the one that matters. Whatever your catalog is built on, a material, an origin claim, a use case, tends to sit at the end of the title, which is exactly where the cut lands. Those phrases belong in Item Highlights, deliberately placed, rather than left to a rewrite to keep or discard.
The three ways this can go
- Do nothingNo effort · least
control
Amazon rewrites every non-compliant title on its own schedule and writes the Item Highlights too. Compliance is guaranteed. The wording, the keyword that leads, and whether your key phrases survive are not.
- Rewrite the active listings firstSmall
job · protects revenue
Drafts and inactive listings are not earning. Hand-writing title-plus-highlights pairs for everything currently live covers your actual exposure and sets the pattern for the rest.
- Rewrite the full catalogLarger job
· full control
Every product gets a 75-character title and a 125-character Item Highlights written to keep each keyword indexed. Cleanest outcome, and inactive listings go live already compliant.
Whichever way you go, the first practical step is opening Review Listing Changes in Seller Central. It shows which listings Amazon has already flagged or rewritten, and whether anything currently live has already been changed without you noticing.
Sources
- Amazon Seller Central, product title requirements. The authority, though it blocks automated reading, so figures here are corroborated against trade coverage.
- Zentail, Amazon is cutting product titles to 75 characters
- Canopy Management, the 75-character title limit and Item Highlights
- Amalytix, optimising Amazon product titles
- Search Engine Land, Amazon's title policy update, covering the January 2025 rules that still apply