Your product titles don't say what the product is

Your product title is the shortest field on the site and the most re-used. Here is a title formula that works for search, for AI shortlists and for a first-time buyer.

The product title is the shortest piece of copy on your store and the hardest working. It feeds the page title, the H1, the collection page card, your internal search, the Google Shopping feed, the Shop channel, and the name field in your product structured data. Write it once and it lands in all of those places at once.

Which makes it strange how many titles describe the pack instead of the product.

Go and look at your own catalogue. Count how many titles are basically a size and a quantity. Premium Blend 500g. Original Formula 6 Pack. Signature 250ml Twin. Those titles tell a first-time buyer almost nothing, and they tell a machine less than that. They assume the reader already knows what the thing is, who it's for, and why this one rather than the one beside it. Your repeat customers do know. Nobody else does, and everybody else is where the growth is.

"Your product title is the shortest field on the site — and the most re-used."

Title has to survive being read out of context

On your product page the title is surrounded by help. There's a hero image above it, a description below it, a breadcrumb, a set of trust icons and a nav bar carrying your brand name. Read in that setting, “Original Formula 6 Pack” makes perfect sense.

Now strip all of that away:

• Google Shopping result. The title sits beside a thumbnail, a price and a merchant name. Nothing else.
• AI assistant answer. It may appear as a plain line of text with no image at all.
• Your own site search. It sits in a list of a dozen near-identical strings, and if a customer can't tell them apart they pick none of them.
• Structured data an aggregator ingests. It's a JSON field with no page around it whatsoever.

The test for a title is whether it still works stripped of every one of those supports. Most don't, and the reason is simple. They were written by someone who had the product sitting in front of them.

Seventy characters is the real budget

Google Merchant Center accepts titles up to 150 characters but only displays around 70 in Shopping ads and free product listings. Google's own guidance is to keep titles at 70 characters or fewer where you can, and to put the distinguishing attributes at the front rather than trailing them at the end.

Two consequences follow. Whatever identifies the product has to sit inside the first 70 characters, because the rest may never be seen by anyone. And the front of the title is your most valuable text real estate on the whole site, which most stores spend on the brand name. If your brand is genuinely the reason people buy, lead with it. If it isn't, the product type has earned that position.

A few things Google will reject or suppress outright:

• Promotional language — Sale, Free Shipping, Best Price and similar.
• Block capitals.
• Strings of punctuation and symbols.

If your titles carry any of that, it's costing you feed approvals as well as clarity.

The formula

A working title answers three questions, in this order:

• What it is. The plain category noun a stranger would use, not your internal range name. If it's a dog shampoo, the word shampoo appears in the title.
• Who or what it's for. The qualifier that narrows the field. Sensitive skin. Puppies. Cold-water swimming. Commercial kitchens.
• What makes it different. The single attribute separating this SKU from its neighbours. The active ingredient, the material, the format, or the size where size is genuinely the buying decision rather than an afterthought.

So “Signature 250ml” becomes something nearer to “Oatmeal Dog Shampoo for Sensitive Skin, 250ml”. Longer. Plainer. And it works with no page around it.

Two rules keep this from going sideways:

• Use one product name consistently across the site, so the title, the H1, the nav label and the SEO title all agree with each other.
• Write for someone who has never heard of you, because in an AI-assembled shortlist that is precisely who is reading.

Worth being clear about what this work actually is. It isn't development. Nobody needs to open the theme. It's a strategy decision about how you name things, followed by data entry. That combination is exactly why it sits undone in most catalogues. Too unglamorous for the agency to propose, too fiddly for the founder to sit down and do.

The variant trap

A related habit worth breaking. Where a store has genuine variants, the size, the colour, the pack count, that information belongs in the variant options, not baked into a separate product title.

Four products called “Signature 250ml”, “Signature 500ml”, “Signature 1L” and “Signature 2L Refill” split your reviews four ways, split your traffic four ways, and give an AI system four thin records instead of one strong one. One product with four variants carries the reviews, the ratings and the structured data in a single place, which is how both the customer and the machine expect to find it.

The exception is when the size is the product rather than a version of it. A travel size and a professional 5L bottle are two different buying decisions. Use judgment, but the default is fewer products, more variants.

What a language model does with a vague title

When somebody asks an assistant for a shampoo for a dog with itchy skin, the assistant isn't browsing your site. It's building a shortlist out of structured product data pulled from a lot of stores at once, and the name field is the first thing it reads.

Product schema has three fields Google treats as required for rich results: name, image and offers. Name is the only one of those you control completely, from a text box in your admin, with no developer involved.

A title reading “Signature 250ml” gives the model nothing to match against the question. It doesn't know the product is a shampoo. It doesn't know it suits sensitive skin. It has no reason to include you.

"It won't dig through your description looking for a way to rescue you. It will pick the store that said what the product was."

That's a different job from the one your description does, which is a separate piece in this series, The description an AI reads is not the one on your page. Short version: the title identifies, the description positions. Plenty of stores have them the wrong way round.

Which products to rewrite first

Nobody rewrites 2,000 titles in a week, and nobody needs to. Sequence it:

1. Start in Shopify Analytics, with the products by sessions report and the products by units sold report, both over the last 90 days. Anything sitting near the top of both is already working, so a better title compounds fastest there. Products with high sessions and weak conversion are your second group.
2. Run a mechanical pass for the obvious offenders, regardless of traffic. Titles under about 25 characters. Titles where the only distinguishing token is a number and a unit. Titles that lead with your range name rather than the product type. Export the catalogue to CSV, sort on title length, and those three filters will surface most of the problem in twenty minutes.
3. Fix a batch of 20 and leave them four weeks. Then compare impressions and clicks in Search Console for those URLs against a set you deliberately left alone. It's a small sample and it won't be statistically clean, but directionally you'll know quickly whether the next 200 are worth doing.

At beCommerce, we help Australian Shopify stores rewrite titles, categories and attributes so both search engines and AI assistants can actually tell what you sell. If you want a hand running the audit above across your full catalogue, let's talk.