How often Google rewrites a title tag: 61.6% to 76%

Two researchers, three years apart, asked the same question with two different datasets: how often does Google use a page’s title tag as written, versus rewriting it for the results page. Cyrus Shepard’s 2022 study put the rate at 61.6%. John McAlpin’s 2025 follow-up put it at 76%. Both studies also isolated a specific, actionable lever: what a title tag matching its H1 does to the odds of a rewrite.

The overall rewrite rate rose from 61.6% to 76%#

Shepard, an SEO consultant at Zyppy, examined 80,959 title tags across 2,370 sites in early 2022 and found Google rewrote 61.6% of them at least partially, whether by trimming, reordering, appending a brand name, or replacing the title outright with text pulled from the page. Search Engine Journal covered the study on publication and it has been cited across the industry since.

McAlpin’s study, published on Search Engine Land in May 2025, sampled roughly 30,000 keywords in the top 20 results during Q1 2025 and found a 76% rewrite rate, close to a 25% relative increase from Shepard’s figure. McAlpin’s data attributes the largest share of rewrites, 63%, to Google stripping brand names, with readability and clarity changes accounting for another 30%. Neither study names a single cause for the increase between 2022 and 2025; the two are independent measurements taken with different tools and different keyword sets, not the same dataset checked twice.

Matching the H1 cuts the rewrite rate to 20.6%#

The more useful finding for anyone writing title tags sits inside Shepard’s original data, not the headline number. When a page’s title tag says roughly the same thing as its H1, including cases with elements Google commonly strips like pipe characters, the rewrite rate drops to 20.6%, a third of the 61.6% baseline. Shepard’s study also isolated length as a factor independent of H1 alignment: titles between 51 and 60 characters were rewritten only 39% to 42% of the time, the lowest rate in the study, while titles over 70 characters were rewritten 99.9% of the time and titles of 1 to 5 characters were rewritten 96.6% of the time.

Neither finding is a guarantee. A title that matches its H1 and sits in the 51 to 60 character range still gets rewritten roughly one time in five, on Shepard’s numbers. What the data supports is a lever, not a lock: title and H1 agreement, and a length that avoids Google’s truncation point, both measurably reduce the odds without eliminating them.

Why we care#

A rewrite rate above 60%, rising toward 76%, means most title tags you write are not the title tag searchers actually see. That is a reason to write titles Google is less likely to touch, not a reason to stop writing them carefully: the two factors both studies isolate, H1 alignment and character length, are both things a site controls before publishing, unlike the query-dependent snippet rewriting Google does to meta descriptions.

Check where a title actually truncates before publishing it. Our SERP snippet preview measures rendered pixel width rather than character count, since Google truncates by width and a 50-character title in a wide typeface can cut earlier than a 60-character title in a narrow one. It will not tell you whether Google keeps your title intact, since neither this tool nor any study here can see Google’s rewriting model directly, but it removes length as a guessing game before you check the one factor that is proven to matter more: whether the title agrees with the H1 underneath it.