Google Says It Now Uses Titles 87% Of The Time Vs 80%

I’ve been asking Google for a month now how big of a change was the title change – where did it go from and to? Well, Google did tell us it uses HTML title tags 80% of the time but it didn’t tell us what that number was before. Now Google changed it to use it 87% of the time. What was it before the change a month ago, I am not sure. But Google switched it from 80% to 87% in the past couple of weeks, which we kind of noticed.

Google said this morning that the “title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before.” Then Google got into why it made this seven point change.

Often Google sees half empty titles, obsolete titles, inaccurate titles, micro-boilerplate titles, and so on. Yea, we get it.

Google even offered guidelines to encourage Google to use your HTML titles, Google said:

Our main advice to site owners about titles remains generally the same as on our help page about the topic. Focus on creating great HTML title elements. Those are by far what we use the most.

Beyond this, consider the examples in this post to understand if you might have similar patterns that could cause our systems to look beyond your title elements. The changes we’ve made are largely designed to help compensate for issues that creators might not realize their titles are having. Making changes may help ensure your title element is again used. That’s really our preference, as well.

Finally, Google said it is still making improvements, which we kinda of saw already.

Exactly!

Our work will continue so that your work can continue, and because your work also continues 🙂

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) September 17, 2021

Last month, we shared about our new system for generating titles for web page results. Thanks to your much appreciated feedback, we’ve further refined our titles system. Here’s more about what we’ve been doing and some additional guidance for creators. https://t.co/Ahm659Shba

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) September 17, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.