Tymoo Guidelines · Preview

Amazon capped titles at 75 characters and says it will rewrite the ones still over. Here is what its rules require, graded by what backs them.

Sources checked October 2026 | Last revised 2026-10-11 | Next review January 2027

By Chuck Aikens | I run Tymoo, a one-person consultancy for consumer product brands | 15 years of doing this work

Why it matters now

On July 27, 2026 Amazon cut the title limit from 200 characters to 75 and said it would rewrite titles still over the limit to its own AI recommendation, gradually. Amazon's rules come with stated penalties, so they're worth following, but measured evidence that following them lifts sales is thin: one preprint abstract on titles shows a direction and no size, one small practitioner test checked indexing rather than sales, and everything else is Amazon's own claim or a vendor's correlation. Amazon's shopping assistant isn't covered here yet. It gets its own section when I next revise this Guideline.

1. Title

The rule

Write every title to 75 characters or fewer, including spaces, in this order: brand, flavor or style, product type, key attribute, then size or pack count. Put the top search keyword for the product in it. Skip anything promotional.

Why it works

  • The limit and the character rules carry a penalty. A title that breaks them, in Amazon's words, "might be automatically corrected or it might not appear in our search results."
  • Amazon has said it will rewrite long titles. After July 27, 2026, titles still over 75 characters are to be updated to Amazon's AI recommendation, gradually. Brand owners get "14 days before implementation to review, modify, and approve AI-generated recommendations," and the listing will "stay active throughout this process."
  • Keywords in titles have the one published test. Two authors, the first employed by a consumer brand owner, ran four A/B tests on Amazon over 2.5 million customer accounts and reported "a substantial and statistically significant enhancement in product sales conversion when top search keywords were integrated into product titles." It's a 2023 preprint, not peer reviewed, abstract only: no effect size, no product count, no test length, and it ran before the 75-character rule. The direction is good news. The size is unknown.

How to do it

  • Count characters with spaces. 75 is the ceiling for every product type but media, in the US and most other Amazon stores.
  • No word more than twice. Prepositions, articles and conjunctions are exempt, and brand names count toward the limit.
  • Leave out promotional phrases and the banned characters: ! $ ? _ { } ^ ¬ ¦
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word, except short prepositions, conjunctions and articles. No all caps.
  • If you're the brand owner, review Amazon's rewrite during the 14-day window instead of letting it go through.

2. A+ Content

The rule

Use A+ if your brand is eligible, follow its module and claim rules exactly, and write it to be useful, not to hit a percentage.

Why it works

  • It's rule-heavy and policed. Breaking the rules could "lead to a rejection by our system or potential removal of your ASIN" as a restricted product.
  • Amazon's own pitch is a ceiling, not a promise. Amazon's quick guide says: "Basic A+ Content can help boost sales up to 8%, while Premium A+ Content can help boost sales up to 20%." That's Amazon's claim about its own feature, and the guide doesn't publish the method, the sample or the distribution. Its own footnote says results vary and "is not a guarantee of future sales." And "up to" states a ceiling, not an average.

How to do it

  • Eligibility: a Brand Registry role on the ASIN, a professional seller account, and the right module set.
  • Remove any claim to "cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent diseases" from food, supplement and other health products, and add a substantiating note to the other claims.
  • No pricing, promotions, shipping or warranty language, no off-Amazon contact details, no competitor comparisons.
  • Images: .jpg, .bmp or .png, RGB, under 2 MB, no watermarks, no QR codes, no repeats of your image gallery.
  • To learn what A+ does for you, run Manage Your Experiments. It splits shoppers at random between two versions and reports units, sales and conversion. It's the one method available to you where Amazon describes the design.

3. Backend search terms

The rule

Use the field for synonyms and spelling variants your visible copy doesn't carry. Keep it under 200 bytes. Never put in brands, ASINs, or subjective or temporary words.

Why it works

  • Rule-breaking has teeth. Prohibited terms "may result in your ASIN being suppressed and may put the health of your selling account at risk."
  • Amazon decides whether to use what you supply. The field is for matching words between a product and a query, and Amazon says "Amazon may not use the search terms that you supply for any reason."
  • Amazon's pages give two numbers for the same field, 250 bytes on two help pages and 200 in its error table. My rule is 200, because it clears both. If 250 turns out to be the live limit, the cost is 50 bytes of synonyms, and I'd take that over a rejected upload.
  • For 23 product types the field is required, not optional, effective December 6, 2023. Beauty, body care and body deodorant are on the list. Check your product type before you leave it blank.

How to do it

  • Synonyms, spelling variations and abbreviations. Lowercase, spaces between words, no semicolons, colons or dashes.
  • "Avoid repetitions." Skip articles and prepositions. Use singular or plural, not both.
  • No brand names (yours or anyone's), no profanity, no "new" or "on sale," no "best" or "effective."
  • Bytes, not characters: accented letters take two or more. In Seller Central the field "stops accepting inputs when the byte limit is reached," and a template over the limit returns an error, so going over doesn't quietly void the field.

4. Attributes and browse node

The rule

Fill every Required attribute, then the Recommended ones, and classify each product to the most specific category with an exactly spelled Item Type Keyword.

Why it works

  • Required attributes block the listing if they're missing. There's no partial credit.
  • Category can decide whether you appear at all. Amazon's own example is a brownie mix filed under baking supplies that "may not appear" for the query "brownie mix," because for searches in All Departments Amazon "may restrict shopping results to return products that belong to specific item type keyword." That's about eligibility for a query, not a measured rank effect.
  • Amazon says complete attributes improve search visibility and let shoppers filter to your product. It shows no method, so take it as Amazon's claim.

How to do it

  • Use the template values from the drop-down, and templates less than 90 days old.
  • Pick "the most relevant and specific category browse node." One node per product. Amazon says a change to an ASIN's browse node "can take up to 72 hours to reflect in shopping results."
  • Your title, bullets and description feed Amazon's category classification, so a title that misses the product type can cost you the right node.
  • Check the category after any listing edit. Classification reads the listing text, so an edit can move you.

The full Guidelines cover

What clients get

This Preview is four rules out of seven. Clients read the whole Amazon Guideline on app.tymoo.ai: every rule, the measuring method, the where-to-start order and the audit checklist, updated quarterly. Amazon revises its pages without dating them, and the title limit just changed, so the quarterly re-read is the part that keeps it true.

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