Google Showing Header Tags Instead Of Titles For Search Snippets

I am seeing numerous complaints this morning that Google is showing header tags, H1s and H2s, instead of the meta title tags, for its search result snippets. I am seeing some public complaints on Twitter, but also in some of the private forums and emails.

So this seems to be more widespread of a change. I tried to quickly replicate it, but I didn’t come up with any examples.

Yes, I know Google might not show the title tag for the clickable link of the Google search result snippet, but often Google does. And based on the early chatter, there may have been a shift in how Google is handling it. Maybe it is a bug or a test, I am not sure.

Here are some of the public mentions of this:

Anyone seeing massive title rewrite on Google? Been noticing it on multiple SERPs for multiple keywords that Google is either pulling H1 or H2 to use for title.@rustybrick #SEO #searchengineoptimization #Google

— Jackie Owen (@techjackie) August 17, 2021

Today I saw Google showing H1 tag in SERP rather than meta title.. @glenngabe @rustybrick is their any changes in results ?

— Aasif Khan (@theaasifkhan) August 17, 2021

Robert Owen from Timberwise shared a few examples with me, here is one:

If you look at the page, Google is pulling the H1, not the title tag.

Do you see any of this?

Forum discussion at Twitter.