Since 27 July 2026 Amazon product titles are capped at 75 characters, with a new 125-character Item Highlights field carrying the overflow. Amazon has been generating the split for non-compliant listings itself, and brand owners get only 14 days to review a suggestion before it publishes — so the urgent job is not rewriting your title, it is checking which version is live right now.
What actually changed
Amazon has split the product title into two fields. The item name is now capped at 75 characters including spaces, and a new field called Item Highlights holds up to 125 more. Amazon's own framing is that the total content budget is unchanged at 200 characters, only now divided across two boxes instead of one. Media categories — books, music, video — are outside the rule.
The second field is not a hidden attribute like backend search terms. From 10 August 2026 Item Highlights displays beneath the item name on both desktop and mobile, in search results and on the detail page. Shoppers see it, which means it is doing merchandising work as well as indexing work, and the two jobs do not always want the same words.
On the question every seller asked first, Amazon has been unusually direct. In its answers thread on the seller forums it states that item name and Item Highlights are “both inputs for search, and one isn't prioritized over the other.” Take that at face value: content moved into the new field is still indexed. It is not a demotion to a dead zone.
The part that is actually urgent
Amazon did not simply wait for sellers to comply. For listings over the limit it began generating its own AI-written split, and brand owners get 14 days in the Review Listing Changes tool to review, modify or approve that suggestion before it goes live. If nobody opens the tool, the suggestion publishes on its own.
That is the whole reason this post is worth your Monday morning. The deadline that matters is not a policy date you can look up — it is a rolling 14-day clock that started on a different day for every ASIN you own, and for a lot of accounts it has already run out. The title on your live detail page may no longer be the title you wrote, and nothing in your ad reports will announce that.
So the first action is not rewriting anything. It is reading. Pull your current live titles and compare them against what you believe they say. Anywhere the two differ, an AI made a keyword decision on your behalf.
Do not trust the calendar, and do not panic about it either
The dates in circulation do not agree. Amazon's forum posts put the start of recommendations at 27 July 2026, while trade coverage has variously reported an original date of 26 July and a revised start of 3 August. We are not going to publish a single hard cutover date, because the sources genuinely conflict and because Amazon itself has said the date is not the point.
Amazon's moderator described 27 July as “the kick-off date, not a hard deadline,” with changes phased in progressively through the year rather than enforced overnight. It also confirmed that listings over the limit “will remain active, editable, and searchable, even if they haven't been updated yet.”
Read those two statements together and the practical position is clear. Nothing gets suppressed for being long, so there is no emergency. But the rewrites are already happening in the background across 2026, so there is no reason to wait either. The risk is not a penalty; the risk is drift you never noticed.
The one failure mode worth hunting: split phrases
Amazon's position is that relevancy does not change when a title is simply divided across the two fields. The failure mode is not the format — it is what an automated rewrite does to multi-word phrases when it decides where to cut.
If shoppers search stainless steel coffee grinder and the rewrite leaves stainless steel in the item name while pushing coffee grinder into Item Highlights, both fragments are still indexed, but the intact phrase no longer sits in one place. Whether Amazon's matching treats that identically is precisely what has not been confirmed. This is the single highest-value thing to check, because it is invisible: nothing errors, nothing gets flagged, the listing simply competes slightly differently.
So work through your top ASINs and list the exact phrases you actually rank for and bid on. Then look at where each one now physically sits. Any phrase broken across the boundary is your priority fix, and the fix is to pull it back together inside the 75 characters even if that means evicting something else.
How to spend the 75 characters
Treat the item name as the field with the least room and the most scrutiny, and fill it in strict priority order: brand, then the core product noun a shopper would actually type, then the one or two attributes that distinguish this variation — colour, size, pack count — then whatever high-value phrase still fits intact. Amazon recommends keeping the brand name inside the 75.
Item Highlights then takes what genuinely reads as supporting detail: materials, compatibility, use cases, secondary phrases. Because it renders under the title for shoppers, write it in readable fragments rather than a keyword dump — short attribute phrases separated by a visible divider work well, and they survive being read by a human on a phone.
One constraint to know before you plan: Item Highlights is generally only displayed when the title is inside the 75-character limit. Staying long does not preserve your old title and win you the new field as a bonus. It costs you the new field.
What to do this week
Open Review Listing Changes and clear the queue of pending AI suggestions before their windows expire — that is the only step with a clock on it. Then export your live titles and diff them against your intended copy, so you know which ASINs have already been rewritten and which are still yours.
For every ASIN that changed, check your priority phrases for splits, rebuild the 75 characters by hand where a phrase was broken, and move the remainder into Item Highlights deliberately. Then confirm the phrases you moved are still indexed rather than assuming it, and watch organic rank on those terms for a couple of weeks — a rank drop that starts the week your title silently changed is not a coincidence.
Finally, a note on scope: this applies to Amazon's own listings too, according to a moderator responding to that exact question. This is a catalogue-wide format change, not a seller compliance crackdown. Handle it as housekeeping with a deadline attached, and the main thing you are buying is control over your own copy rather than accepting a machine's guess at it.
Sources
- Amazon Seller Forums — Answers to your product title update questions
- Amazon Seller Forums — New title requirements and fields
- Amalytix — Optimising Amazon product titles: 75 characters and item highlights
- Helium 10 — How to split your title into item name and item highlights
- EcommerceBytes — Amazon's new product title policy also applies to its listings
- AMZScaler — Item Highlights: confirmed facts vs the guesses
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