The 75-Character Title Cap: What to Do Before It's Done to You.

This one has a deadline on it, so let me be useful and direct before I get to the principle.

As of the changes taking effect 27 July 2026, Amazon is capping product titles at 75 characters, including spaces, in every category except media. That's down from the 200 characters many categories allowed, so for a lot of sellers it's a serious cut. Alongside it, Amazon has added a new field called Item Highlights — 125 characters, searchable, shown next to your title — to absorb the detail that no longer fits. And here's the part that should get your attention: after the deadline, titles still over the limit get rewritten by Amazon's AI, on Amazon's schedule. Brand owners get a 14-day window to review, modify or approve those AI recommendations before they go live. Miss that, and the algorithm decides what your title says.

So the choice is stark and simple: engineer your own 75 characters, or let a machine do it for you — a machine that, whatever data Amazon has fed it, has never held your product, never used it, and doesn't understand it the way you do.

Why you do not want the AI to do this for you

Let me be clear about the risk, because "Amazon's AI will handle it" sounds almost helpful until you think it through. Amazon's rewrite AI works from your existing bullets, backend terms and description. Now, you might assume it also weighs the sensible things — that it works out which keyword is actually driving your sales, that it leans on your Brand Analytics, that it knows 40% of your revenue comes through one specific long-tail term you'd never want to sacrifice. You'd hope so. But here's the uncomfortable truth: in practice, up to now, we've seen no evidence that it actually does any of that. What we can observe is an AI optimising for compliance and best-practice formatting — not demonstrably for your P&L. And an automated rewrite that looks like it should protect your best terms, but gives you no evidence that it does, is arguably more dangerous than one you knew to be blind — because it lulls you into trusting it.

So an automated rewrite can quietly drop the exact term your ranking depends on, and you'll find out from your sales graph. Worse, once Amazon has rewritten a title, overriding it can mean a support case rather than a quick edit — you've handed away editorial control of your single highest-weight indexing surface. The seller who moves first keeps the keyword equity an automated rewrite would otherwise spend on their behalf, badly.

The playbook

Here's the sequence I'd run, and it's not complicated — it just has to be done before the deadline rather than after.

1. Audit your catalogue. Export your inventory as a flat file from Manage All Inventory and run a simple length check on every title. Sort by revenue, so you fix the listings that actually matter first — not the ones that happen to be top of the list.

2. Triage your keywords, don't just chop. This is the whole skill. Your title is your highest-weight indexing surface, so it keeps your highest-converting terms — the ones you know (from your own search-term and Brand Analytics data) drive real sales. Everything else gets relocated, not deleted.

3. Lead the title with identity, not a keyword list. Brand, core product noun, and the single most important differentiator. A title that reads like a real product name — specific and clear — is exactly what both a human and an AI reward now. This isn't a loss; it's the forcing function to write the clean title you probably should have had all along.

4. Move secondary terms into Item Highlights. They don't vanish from Amazon's index — they move to a different, still-searchable slot (more on that in the companion piece on Item Highlights). Materials, use cases, comparison terms: that's what the field is for.

5. Approve your own version in Review Listing Changes. Get your engineered title and Item Highlights in before the AI does its pass, so what goes live is your judgement, not the algorithm's guess.

The principle underneath the deadline

Strip away the date and this change is really Amazon forcing a discipline I've argued for for years: curate, don't cram. The 200-character title was an invitation to keyword-stuff, and most of the market accepted it, producing titles that read like a search query had a stroke. The 75-character cap makes stuffing impossible and rewards the seller who can identify the few terms that genuinely matter and lead with a clear product identity.

In other words, the sellers who'll come out ahead aren't the ones who mourn the lost 125 characters. They're the ones who treat the cap as what it really is — a forcing function for better keyword discipline — and who'd quietly been over-stuffing for years. The constraint is doing them a favour.

But you only get that favour if you act before 27 July 2026. Do it yourself, keep the terms that pay your wages, lead with a clean identity, and bank the rest in Item Highlights. Leave it to the deadline and you're not saving effort — you're outsourcing your most important listing decision to a machine that's never met your customer.

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About the author

Zamir Cajee is co-founder of This Way Up, a UK business specialising in Amazon marketplace strategy, and co-host of The Upside Podcast, where he and the team break down how Amazon actually works — and how it lies to you. Zamir has built multi-million dollar businesses from scratch and has been selling into the EU since 2016.

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