How And Why Google Rewrites Your Hard-Earned Headlines

TL;DR

1. Google can and does rewrite headlines and titles frequently. Almost anything on your page could be used.
2. The title is not all that matters. The entirety of your page – from the title to the on-page content – should remove ambiguity.
3. The title tag is the most important term. Stick to 12 words and 600 pixels to avoid truncation and maximize value from each word.
4. Google uses three rough concepts – Semantic title and content alignment, satisfactory click behavior, and searcher intent alignment – for this.

This is based on the Google leak documentation and Shaun Anderson’s excellent article on title tag rewriting. I’ve jazzed it to make it more news and publisher-specific.

“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.”
David Ogilvy

No idea if that’s true or not.

I’m sure it’s some old-age advertising BS. But alongside the featured image, it is our shop window. Headlines are the gatekeepers. They need to be clickable, work for humans and machines, and prioritize clarity.

So, when you’ve spent a long time crafting a headline for your own story, why-oh-why does Google mess you around?

I’m sure you get a ton of questions from other people in the SEO team and the wider newsroom (or the legal team) about this.

Something like:

Why is our on-page headline being pulled into the SERP?

Or

We can just have the same on-page headline and title tag, can’t we? Why does it matter?

You could rinse and repeat this conversation and theory for almost anything. Meta descriptions are the most obvious situation, where some research shows they’re rewritten 70% of the time. The answer will, unfortunately, always be that, because Google can and does do what it wants.

But it helps to know the what and the why when having these conversations.

Mark Williams-Cook and team did some research to show that up to 80% of meta descriptions were being rewritten and the rewriting increased traffic. Maybe the machine knows best after all.

Why Does Google Rewrite Title Tags?

The search giant uses document understanding, query matching, content rewriting, and user engagement data to determine when a title or H1 should be changed in SERPs.

It rewrites them because it knows what is best satisfying users in real time. An area of search where we as publishers are at the bleeding edge. When you have access to that much data and you take a share of ad revenue, it would be a little obtuse not to optimize for clicks in real-time.

Does Length Matter?

No innuendos, please; this is a professional newsletter.

Google’s official documentation doesn’t define a limit for title tags. I think it’s just based on the title becoming truncated. Given Google now rewrites so much, longer, more keyword-rich and descriptive titles, longer titles could help with ranking in Top Stories and traditional search results.

According to Gary Illyes, there is real value in having longer title tags:

“The title tag (length), is an externally made-up metric. Technically there’s a limit, but it’s not a small number…

Try to keep it precise to the page, but I wouldn’t think about whether it’s long enough…”

Sara Taher ran some interesting analysis (albeit on evergreen content only) that showed the average title length falls between 42-46 characters. If titles are too long, Google will probably cut them off or rewrite them. Precision matters for evergreen search.

What Are The Key Determinants?

Based on the Google leak and Shaun’s analysis, I’d say there are three concepts at play Google uses to determine whether a title should be rewritten. I have made this up, by the way, so feel free to use your own.

• Semantic title and content alignment.
• Satisfactory click behavior.
• Searcher intent alignment.

Semantic Title And Content Alignment

This is undoubtedly the most prominent section. Your on-page content and title/headline have to align.

This is why clickbait content and content written directly for Google Discover is so risky. Because you’re writing a cheque that you can’t cash. Create content specifically for a platform like Discover, and you will erode your quality signals over time.

The titlematchScore, h1ContentScore, and spammyTitleDetection review the base quality of a headline based on the page’s content and query intent. Mismatched titles, headlines, and keyword-stuffed versions are, at best, rewritten.

At worst, they downgrade the quality of your site algorithmically.

The titleMatchAnchorText ensures our title tags and header(s) are compared to internal and external anchors and evaluated in comparison to the hierarchy of the page (the headingHierarchyScore).

Finally, the “best” title is chosen from on-page elements via the snippetTitleExtraction. While Google primarily uses the title or H1 tag, any visible element can be used if it “best represents the page.”

Satisfactory Click Behavior

Much more straightforward. Exactly how Google uses user engagement signals (think of Navboost’s good vs bad click signals) to best cultivate a SERP for a particular term and cohort of people.

The titleClickSatisfaction metric combines click data at a query level with on-page engagement data (think scroll depth, time on page, on-page interactions, pogo-sticking).

So, ranking adjustments are made if Google believes the title used in the SERP is underperforming against your prior performance and the competition. So, the title you see could be one of many tests happening simultaneously, I suspect.

For those unfamiliar with Navboost, it is one of Google’s primary ranking engines. It’s based on user interaction signals, like clicks, hovers, scrolls, and swipes, over 13 months to refine rankings.

For news publishers, Glue helps rank content in real time for fresh, real-time events. Source and page level authority. It’s a fundamental part of how news SEO really works.

Searcher Intent Alignment

Searcher intent really matters when it comes to page titles. And Google knows this far better than we do. So, if the content on your page (headings, paragraphs, images, et al.) and search intent isn’t reflected by your page title, it’s gone.

Once a page title has been identified as not fit for purpose, the pageTitleRewriter metric is designed to rewrite “unhelpful or misleading page titles.”

And page titles are rewritten at a query level. The queryIntentTitleAlignment measures how the page title aligns with searcher intent. Once this is established, the page alignment and query intent are reviewed to ensure the title best reflects the page at a query level.

Then the queryDependentTitleSelection adjusts the title based on the specifics of the search and searcher. Primarily at the query and location-level. The best contextual match is picked.

Suggestions For Publishers

I’ll try to do this (in a vague order of precedence):

1. Make your title stand out. Be clickable. Front-load entities. Use power words, numbers, or punctuation where applicable.
2. Stick to 12 words and 600 pixels to avoid truncation and maximize value from each word.
3. Your title tag better represent the content on your page effectively for people and machines.
4. Avoid keyword stuffing. Entities in headlines = good. Search revolves around entities. People, places, and organizations are the bedrock of search and news in particular. Just don’t overdo it.
5. Do not lean too heavily into clickbait headlines. There’s a temptation to do more for Discover at the minute. The headlines on that platform tend to sail a little too close to the clickbait wind.
6. Make sure your title best reflects the user intent and keep things simple. The benefit of search is that people are directly looking for an answer. Titles don’t always have to be wildly clicky, especially with evergreen content. Simple, direct language helps pass titleLanguageClarity checks and reduces truncation
7. Utilize secondary (H2s) and tertiary (H3s) headings on your page. This has multiple benefits. A well broken-up page encourages quality user engagement. It increases the chances of your article ranking for longer-tail queries. And, it helps provide the relevant context to your page for Google.
8. Monitor CTR and run headline testing on-site. If you have the capacity to run headline testing in real-time, fantastic. If not, I suggest taking headline and CTR data at scale and building a model that helps you understand what makes a headline clickable at a subfolder or topic level. Do emotional, first-person headlines with a front-loaded entity perform best in /politics, for example?
9. Control your internal anchor text. Particularly important for evergreen content. But even with news, there are five headlines to pay attention to. And internal links (and their anchors) are a pivotal one. The matching anchor text reinforces trust in the topic.

If you are looking into developing your Discover profile, I would recommend testing the OG title if you want to test “clickier” headlines that aren’t visible on page.

Final Thoughts

So, the goal isn’t just to have a well-crafted headline. The goal is to have a brilliant set of titles – clickable, entity and keyword rich, highly relevant. As Shaun says, it’s to create a constellation of signals – the