Google truncates long titles and rewrites bad ones. Both cost clicks you already earned with the ranking. The working range is 35 to 60 characters: short enough to render whole on desktop and mobile, long enough to say something a searcher would choose.
What happens outside the range
- Over 60 characters: the tail gets cut with an ellipsis and the part that earns the click is usually in the tail. Worse, heavy truncation invites Google to rewrite the title entirely, and its rewrite rarely sells your page.
- Under 35: the title wastes its space. Thin titles also get rewritten, often into something generic pulled from your H1 or anchor text.
Why this shows up as lost clicks
Position and click-through are coupled. A page ranking well with a truncated title earns a fraction of the clicks normal for its spot and sustained under-clicking erodes the position itself. If Search Console shows strong impressions with weak clicks, the title is the first suspect. We wrote about the companion problem in meta description length.
Writing inside the range
- Lead with the searcher's words for the topic, the phrase they typed.
- Spend the remaining characters on the reason to choose you: a number, an outcome, a differentiator. Not your brand slogan.
- Brand name at the end if it fits, dropped if it does not. Google appends site names anyway.
- Count characters, not words and count the pipe or dash separators too.
found enforces exactly this range in its SEO reports: every title it writes for you lands between 35 and 60 characters and when you mark a fix done it re-reads your live page and confirms the length before the tick counts. See it on your site.
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