When Amazon cut product titles to 75 characters in July, the reaction was predictable: sellers scrambled to figure out what to keep. Today, the other half of that equation goes live. Amazon's new Item Highlights field is now appearing beneath the Item name on desktop and mobile, and it gives you 125 more characters of searchable real estate that didn't exist yesterday.
Worth noting: the total character count across both fields is 200, the same number the old title limit allowed. Amazon didn't take anything away. It reorganized what goes where, and added a new display slot in the process.
What Item Highlights Does
Item Highlights is a 125-character field that sits directly below your product title in search results and on product detail pages. Amazon has confirmed that both fields, Item name and Item Highlights, feed the search index, and neither one is prioritized over the other for discoverability. So filling it in matters for more than just the visual impression it makes.
The field is also customer-visible. It's not a back-end metadata field or a hidden keyword slot. Shoppers see it, which means it's doing two jobs at once: informing the search algorithm and doing sales work on the page.
Those two goals don't always point in the same direction, and the field is short enough that you'll have to pick one.
What to Put There
Your title should now do exactly one thing: name the product clearly. Brand, what it is, the key variant. That's what fits in 75 characters when you're not padding with keywords. Item Highlights is where the secondary information goes.
Think about what a customer needs to know right after they read the product name: size, quantity, compatibility, or the one detail that answers the most common pre-purchase question for your category. That's your 125 characters.
If you're optimizing for AI-mediated search (and at this point you should be), Item Highlights is also the place to put the structured factual claims that AI shopping assistants tend to surface. "Compatible with X. Fits Y. Rated for Z." Clear, verifiable statements that an AI can confidently repeat when a customer asks a specific question.
What Happens If You Don't Fill It In
Amazon will not auto-populate Item Highlights for you. If you leave it blank, it stays blank. You just give up 125 searchable, customer-visible characters while your competition, presumably, does not. That's a choice, but it's not a great one.
For brands with large catalogs, the path of least resistance is to export your inventory file, add an Item Highlights column, and populate it in bulk before re-uploading. If you're already in the middle of updating titles to meet the 75-character cap, add this to the same pass. The work's already open.
A Note on the Broader Shift
What Amazon is building here is a more structured product page: titles name the product, Highlights explain why it's the right one, bullet points go deeper, A+ Content handles the brand story. Each field has a job. Sellers who treat all of them as interchangeable keyword containers are going to get less out of all of them.
This is also consistent with how Amazon's advertising and discovery systems are evolving. Alexa for Shopping and the AI-powered search experience all work better with clean, structured data than with keyword-dense blobs. The listing changes Amazon keeps making in 2026 are, at least in part, about feeding those systems better inputs.
If you want help figuring out how to divide your 200 characters between the two fields, and how to write Item Highlights that work for both search and conversion, we're happy to take a look. Schedule a call and we can walk through your catalog together.