The page title is the text in a page's title element, shown as the clickable headline in search results. Google uses it as the main source for that headline, along with the visible heading, link text and other prominent text, and will rewrite it when it judges the title unhelpful. A good title says specifically what the page is, in the words the searcher used, without padding.
What Google builds the headline from
Google lists its sources: the title element, the main visual title on the page, headings, the social sharing title, other large prominent text, anchor text on the page, text in links pointing at the page, and site name structured data. The title element comes first, and Google says it rewrites when it detects an issue: a title that is missing, duplicated across pages, stuffed with keywords, or plainly not describing the page.
Rewrites became noticeably more common from 2021. If your titles are consistently replaced, it is a message about the titles.
How to write one
Describe the page precisely, in the phrase a searcher would type, first. Then, if it helps the click, a reason: a number, a year, a location, a promise the page keeps. Then the brand, short, at the end, after a separator. Every page gets a different title. Google's guidance asks for descriptive and concise, and warns against vague descriptors and keyword stuffing.
On length, Google says titles are truncated to fit the device rather than at a fixed count. In practice fifty to sixty characters survive on most screens. Put the important words early so that when truncation happens it takes the brand, not the meaning.
The brand question
Google's guidance suggests including the site name at the beginning or end, separated by a hyphen, colon or pipe. Its results also show the site name on its own line, so the brand is visible whether or not it is in the title. That makes the brand suffix a choice rather than a necessity: keep it where it reassures and costs nothing, and test removing it on pages where every character is competing for a tight query.
How to find the titles that need work
In Search Console, sort pages by impressions, look at positions between three and ten, and find the click rates well below what that position should earn. Those titles are being seen and not chosen. Rewrite, wait a fortnight, compare. It is the highest-leverage on-page change available and it takes minutes per page.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
CTR
Click-through rate is the share of people who saw your result and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, shown as a percentage in Search Console. It falls steeply with position, so it only means anything when compared against the position it was earned at. Whether Google uses clicks to rank is a question with two honest halves, covered below.
Branded search
A branded search is a query that includes your business or product name, such as your company name plus reviews, opening hours or a product. Non-branded searches are everything else. Branded traffic measures whether people already know you; non-branded traffic measures whether search is finding you new customers. Reporting them together hides both answers.
URL slug
The URL slug is the part of a web address after the last slash that identifies the page, such as wedding-fireworks in yourbrand.com/wedding-fireworks. Google recommends readable words separated by hyphens. It also says the keywords in a URL on their own have hardly any ranking effect, so the slug is for clarity, not for gaming.
Featured snippet
A featured snippet is a result where Google shows a passage from a page first, above the page's title and link, usually at the top of the results, to answer the query directly. Google's systems choose the page automatically; there is no markup that requests it. Since 2020 a page shown as the snippet is not repeated lower down, and Search Console counts it as position one.