Google rewrites titles. Here is when, and what to do about it

The title link is generated, not copied

The clickable headline in a search result is called the title link, and Google generates it. Your title element is the main input, and usually the one that is used — but it is an input.

“Google’s generation of title links on the Google Search results page is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page and references to it that appear on the web.”

— Google Search Central, "Influencing your title links in search results"

What triggers a rewrite

Google names the situations in which it tries to improve on what you supplied:

• Boilerplate text repeated across many pages — the single most common cause on a templated site.
• Titles that do not accurately describe the page.
• Titles that are stale relative to the content.
• A mismatch between the language of the title and the language of the page.
• Several equally prominent headings, with no clear main one.

The length rule you have probably been given is not Google’s

The advice to keep titles under some specific character count is widespread. Google’s own documentation says something different:

“There’s no limit on how long a <title> element can be, the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.”

— Google Search Central, "Influencing your title links in search results"

So what is worth doing

The useful goal is not a character count. It is that each title describes its own page distinctly, and that the part which identifies the page comes before the part that identifies the site — because truncation happens at the end.

On a templated site, the fix is almost never per-page editing. It is one change to the template so that the title is built from the data of the page being rendered rather than from a fixed string. That single change corrects every page the template produces.