Amazon has sent sellers an official email confirming that starting July 27, 2026, product titles in all categories except media must be 75 characters or fewer, including spaces. If your titles are longer than that, Amazon's AI will rewrite them for you. Gradually. Whether you like the results or not.
You have until July 27 to get ahead of this. That's about six weeks. Here's what the change actually involves and what you should do with that time.
What's Actually Changing
The 75-character limit isn't entirely new as a concept. Amazon has recommended shorter titles for mobile display for years, and 75-76 characters has long been the unofficial cutoff for what fully renders in search results on a phone screen. What's new is that Amazon is making it a hard rule, enforcing it platform-wide, and automating the fix for listings that don't comply.
After July 27, any title still over 75 characters will be "gradually updated" to Amazon's AI-generated recommendation. Your listings stay active during this process. Brand owners will get a 14-day window to review, modify, or approve the AI-generated title and Item Highlights changes in Review Listing Changes before they go live. If you miss that window or aren't paying attention, Amazon's version of your title goes live automatically.
The AI rewrites won't be malicious. They'll probably be fine. But "probably fine" and "optimized for your specific product and category" are different things.
An AI shortening a title for a supplement, a tool, or a technical product can easily drop a detail that drives purchase decisions: a specific dosage, a compatibility note, a size or material that distinguishes your product from the next one in the search results. We've already seen this happen with Sports brand listings in early rollouts, where truncated titles caused a spike in returns and customer contacts. A human review takes fifteen minutes per listing. A returns spike is harder to unwind.
Item Highlights: The Other Half of This Change
The companion feature is Item Highlights, a new field that gives you 125 additional characters of searchable, visible content. It appears below your title in search results and on product detail pages. Think of it as structured real estate for the information that used to live in your title because you had nowhere else to put it.
The math here is worth noting. You're not losing content capacity. You're reorganizing it. A 75-character title plus 125-character Item Highlights equals 200 total indexable characters, which is roughly what sellers have been working with in a longer title.
The difference is that the two fields serve different jobs. The title is for the click. Item Highlights are for comparison and confirmation, visible to shoppers who are already considering your product.
If you've been stuffing your title with secondary keywords, materials, compatibility notes, and size variants because that was the only visible field, Item Highlights is where those details should go now. That's not a workaround. That's how Amazon is designing this to work.
Amazon is currently offering AI-powered suggestions for both fields. You can access them by going to Manage All Inventory, selecting Edit on any listing, and clicking View Enhancements. We'd recommend reviewing the AI suggestions rather than accepting them wholesale, but they're a useful starting point for understanding what Amazon's algorithm thinks your title and highlights should look like.
Why This Is Really About Mobile and Alexa
Amazon's stated reason for the change is mobile display: more than half of Amazon sessions happen on mobile, and titles over 75 characters get truncated in search results on most phone screens. That's a real problem, and it's the right reason to enforce shorter titles.
But there's a second reason that Amazon doesn't spell out in the email. Alexa for Shopping, Amazon's AI shopping assistant, uses your title as a primary signal when generating product recommendations and answering shopping queries. A 200-character keyword-stuffed title is useful for traditional keyword indexing. It's less useful when an AI is trying to understand what your product actually is and whether it's the right answer to a shopper's question.
Shorter, cleaner titles that lead with the highest-intent information are better inputs for AI-mediated discovery. The brands that treat this change as a content optimization opportunity rather than a compliance headache will be better positioned as Alexa for Shopping continues to grow as a discovery surface. The brands that let the AI rewrite their titles and move on will be fine, right up until they're not.
What to Do Before July 27
Start with an audit. Pull your full catalog and flag every title over 75 characters. For most sellers, this is a larger list than expected. Titles that have accumulated keywords through multiple optimization rounds tend to be the worst offenders, and those are also often the listings where the detail matters most.
For each over-limit title, your job is to decide: what's the single most important thing a shopper needs to see before they click? That's your title. Everything else, the materials, the compatible models, the secondary keywords, the size details, goes into Item Highlights or your bullet points.
Lead with brand and product name, then the most specific differentiating detail. "Parker Tools 12-inch Stainless Steel Ruler" is 43 characters and tells you everything you need. "Parker Tools 12-inch Stainless Steel Flexible Ruler with Non-Slip Grip for Woodworking, Drafting, and Engineering" is 113 characters and wins no awards for clarity on a phone screen at thumbnail size.
If you have a large catalog, prioritize your highest-traffic ASINs first. Those are the listings where a bad AI rewrite has the most downside, and they're also where a well-crafted 75-character title has the most upside in click-through rate.
If you'd like help auditing your catalog and rewriting titles before the July 27 deadline, schedule a call with us. Six weeks sounds like a long time until it isn't.