Blaming the wrong thing when Google rewrites your title

Blaming the wrong thing when Google rewrites your title

"Google rewrote my title, so my title was bad."

Usually not.

Google rewrites roughly 60% of titles, and the trigger is rarely 'quality.' The common causes are mechanical: your title is too long, it's keyword-repetitive, it doesn't match the visible H1, or it's boilerplate identical across many pages. People respond by rewriting for 'punchiness' and the rewrite happens again, because they never fixed the actual trigger.

Here's what actually happens: the most frequent fix that works is aligning the title tag with the on-page H1. Google often rewrites to the H1 — so if you don't like the rewrite, you're really saying you don't like your own H1.

Fix: before touching the title tag, check three things — length under render width, no duplicate keyword, and parity with the H1. Match those and the rewrite rate drops sharply. The title field isn't broken; the mismatch is.