Title Tag Rewrites on Our Own Pages: Method and Results

Are there title tag test results yet?

No: as of 28 October 2026 no result exists, because the test described here has not started. The headline promises method and results, and this page will carry both once there is something to report.

Until then the results section stays empty on purpose. The method is published first so that nobody, including the author, can pick the window, the metric or the threshold after seeing which one flatters the rewrite.

• The claim to test: blog articles whose title tag is rewritten gain more click-through rate than matched articles left alone, over the same weeks.
• The design: eligible articles are paired by baseline impressions, and one article in each pair is rewritten at random, so seasonality and search updates reach both.
• The safeguard: the metric, windows, threshold and decision rule are written here before any title changes.
• The status: the rules are fixed. The sample list, the random seed, the rewritten titles and the start date are not yet recorded, and the sample cannot reach its minimum size before 16 December 2026.

This is the second Kanso test written up in this form. The first, on whether refreshing old posts moves rankings, is the content refresh experiment design, and this protocol borrows its structure.

What is a title tag, and how long should it be?

Moz describes the title tag as a page's headline and says it helps users and search engines understand the page. Its guidance, summarising Google's own advice, is to write a unique and accurate title for every page, keep it brief, describe the content honestly and avoid stuffing keywords.

Length is where the guidance gets slippery. Moz says Google does not specify a recommended length, that most browsers show the first 50 to 60 characters, and that titles of 51 to 60 characters had the fewest rewrites in its study. It also says that staying under 60 characters means about 90% of titles should display correctly.

Those are figures from one publisher's research, not a limit Google publishes. Atticus Li points out that search engines cut titles by pixel width, so a character count is a proxy. That is the honest answer to whether character limits are a myth: they are a rule of thumb that fits most titles and fails some.

On this site the count has one wrinkle. The root layout appends " | Kanso" to every page title, which adds 8 characters, so a displayed title of 51 to 60 characters means a title tag in the page file of 43 to 52. The test counts the displayed length, suffix included.

What does the published evidence on title tags and testing show?

It shows that Google changes titles often and that practitioners recommend testing them, but not that any rewrite raises clicks. The table lists each figure the three supplied pages give, the kind of evidence visible in the text, and what the figure cannot tell you.

None of the seven rows comes from a controlled test of a title rewrite. The Moz figures describe what Google displays, the Mangools figure is an unsourced statement, and the Atticus Li page describes how to run a test without reporting one.

Two of the three pages also promote a product: Moz points to its Moz Pro crawler and its preview tool, and Mangools to its own account and SERP simulator. That does not make the figures wrong. It is a reason to treat the recommendations as advice and the numbers as claims to read with their method in hand.

Does Google rewrite title tags, and why does that matter for a test?

Yes: Moz reports that Google rewrote 58% of the 57,832 title tags in a study by Dr. Peter J. Meyers, so the title a test writes is often not the title searchers see. Applied to the whole sample that is about 33,500 titles (57,832 × 0.58 = 33,543, and the 58% is itself rounded).

Moz lists what tends to trigger a rewrite: titles that are very short or very long, repeated keywords, and titles that do not match the page's content or the search intent. It adds that matching the title to the H1 can reduce rewrites. Atticus Li makes a related point, that frequent rewriting can mean your titles do not fit what searchers want.

Rewriting changes what a test measures. If the displayed title differs from the one you wrote, a click-through rate change cannot be credited to your wording alone. This protocol therefore keeps every page in its assigned arm whatever Google displays, and records separately how often the displayed title matched the written one.

That record also speaks to a question that comes up in r/SEO threads: why a rewritten title reverts to the old one after indexing. This test cannot explain a reversal, and it will not try to. It will count how many of the rewritten pages show the new title, the old one or something else.

Why is comparing clicks before and after a title change not enough?

A before-and-after comparison cannot separate the title from everything else that changed in the same weeks. Atticus Li says a single-page test has no control group to account for algorithm updates, seasonality or competitor activity, and that the results will be unreliable.

The control arm is what makes a number readable. The table below uses invented figures for two scenarios. In both, the rewritten pages are measured identically, and only the untouched pages differ.

In scenario A the naive reading and the controlled reading agree. In scenario B the naive reading reports a 14.5% gain that the untouched pages matched, so the controlled reading finds none. The same rewritten result means opposite things depending on the arm that was left alone.

Notice also that impressions fell in the rewritten arm, from 45,000 to 44,000, while CTR rose. Atticus Li makes the same point: CTR isolates click behaviour from ranking changes, so a CTR gain alongside fewer impressions can hide a ranking loss. That is why impressions and position are recorded alongside CTR.

What does this page register, and what is still open?

This page registers the rules of the test, not yet its sample. The publication timestamp, 28 October 2026 at 20:12 UTC, is the registration time for everything marked fixed.

The commitment is that no title is edited until the four open items are recorded here, and that the fixed items change afterwards only for typographical corrections, which will be listed. Four choices matter most, because each is a common way for a result to be bent after the fact.

• The window. One before window and one after window are fixed now. Trying several and reporting the best is not allowed.
• The metric. CTR is the only deciding metric. Clicks, impressions and position are reported, and they cannot change the verdict.
• Dropping pages. A page leaves the analysis only for the technical reasons listed in the threats section, in either arm.
• Extending the test. There is no extension. A result that is not detected is published as not detected.

What is the hypothesis, and which metric decides it?

The hypothesis is that rewriting a page's title tag changes its click-through rate relative to a matched page whose title is left alone. The null is that the two arms change by the same relative amount, and the test is two-sided because a rewrite that lowers CTR is also an answer.

Click-through rate is chosen because it is the metric a title most directly touches. Atticus Li lists organic clicks, CTR, average position and impressions as the primary measures, and says CTR separates the click effect from ranking changes. The deciding figure is computed per arm from totals, which keeps pages with few impressions from dominating.

CTR (arm, window) = total clicks ÷ total impressions across the arm's pages

relative change = CTR after ÷ CTR before - 1

difference = relative change (rewritten arm) - relative change (untouched arm)

The windows are fixed. The before window is the 4 weeks ending the day before the edits ship. The after window starts 1 week after the edits ship, to let search engines process the new titles, and runs for 4 weeks, which sits inside Atticus Li's three to six weeks. The 4-week and 1-week figures are the author's choices.

Clicks, impressions and average position are secondary. Atticus Li calls position a directional signal that is noisy for one page and meaningful across a group, which is how it is used here. If CTR and position move in opposite directions, the result is reported as a conflict. The guide to reading Search Console as a founder covers where these four numbers live in the reports.

Which pages qualify, and when could the sample be big enough?

A page qualifies if it is an indexable blog article published at least 8 weeks before the freeze date and with at least 100 impressions in the 4-week before window. The 8 weeks cover the 4-week baseline plus time for a new page to be crawled and settle, and the 100-impression floor keeps a page from adding noise without adding information. Both numbers are the author's choices.

• Minimum sample: 40 eligible pages, 20 per arm, which follows the Atticus Li advice of at least twenty pages per group. If fewer qualify at the freeze date, the test is not run and this page says so.
• Pairing: eligible pages are ranked by impressions in the before window, and neighbours are paired. An odd page at the bottom of the ranking is left out and reported.
• Assignment: a published random seed decides which page of each pair is rewritten. The seed is posted before any edit.
• The unit: a page, not a query. Query-level and page-type views are exploratory and cannot change the verdict.

The blog is young, and that limits the schedule. As of 28 October 2026 the /blogs listing, before this page was added, shows 55 articles dated 8 to 27 October 2026, so the oldest is 20 days old. Eight weeks is 8 × 7 = 56 days, and the table shows the date each group of articles passes it.

The 40th article by date was published on 21 October 2026, so the earliest the minimum can be met is 16 December 2026. The real date will be later if some articles fall under the impression floor or if the first edit waits for other work. The test was designed around this constraint instead of lowering the 8-week rule to start sooner.

There is a second limit, and it is an inference. Atticus Li recommends testing a group of pages that serve a similar search intent, and the blog mixes guides, cost pages, teardowns and experiments. Pairing by impressions balances traffic, not intent, so the result can speak for this blog only. The marketing experiments playbook explains why a small sample can catch a large effect and miss a modest one.

What is the title rewrite that the treated pages receive?

The rewrite is a fixed checklist applied to every treated page by one editor. It follows Moz's best-practice advice, so the test asks whether doing the usual thing pays.

1. Put the page's main query at or near the start of the title. The main query is the one that earned the most clicks in the before window.
2. Keep the displayed title, suffix included, between 51 and 60 characters, the range Moz found had the fewest rewrites.
3. Keep the title faithful to the page's H1, since Moz says a match can reduce rewrites.
4. Add no year marker, number or power word that the title did not already have. Atticus Li says these may raise CTR, and leaving them out stops them blurring the result.
5. Set the new title in the page's own metadata, so it is in the HTML the server sends. Atticus Li warns against JavaScript-modified titles, which search engines may not process.

This checklist departs from one piece of Atticus Li's advice, to test one variable at a time. A bundle cannot say which element did the work. We accept that for a first test, because the practical question is whether the usual rewrite changes clicks at all, and a later test can isolate a single element.

Every page gets a log row with its original title, its new title and the date. Atticus Li makes the same point, that the record is needed for analysis and rollback. Neither arm receives any other title or body edit during the windows, and a rewritten page stays in its arm even if Google shows a different title.

Where the pull request comes from does not change the test. For readers who want to run a similar rewrite on their own site, Kanso's Coding Agent prepares title, meta description and canonical fixes as GitHub pull requests for a person to review. It never merges or deploys, and it does not measure the outcome.

What is the decision rule?

The decision rule has four outcomes and is written before any data: supported, contradicted, not detected, or not run. It uses a permutation test, which asks how often chance alone produces a difference as large as the one observed.

The 10-point threshold is the smallest relative change in CTR we would act on, and nothing in the sources supports a particular value. We have not run a power calculation, because it needs the spread of page-level changes, which we do not yet have. With about 20 pairs the test can catch a large effect and may miss a modest one.

A verdict applies to this sample only. A supported result would mean rewritten titles raised CTR on these blog articles in these weeks, not that rewriting titles works for any site.

What can go wrong, and what happens if it does?

Five things can disturb the test: a search update, Google replacing the written titles, new content on the site, technical changes to a page, and a data gap. Each has a rule that is written now.

• A search update. It reaches both arms, which is why the control arm exists. Any update announced during the windows is listed with its date and the result is not adjusted.
• Google replaces the title. Pages stay in their assigned arm, and the share of pages whose displayed title matches the written one is reported. The check runs once, at the end of the after window, from a signed-out browser at a mobile width, because Mangools says more than half of Google searches are on mobile.
• New content. The blog keeps publishing. New articles and any internal links added to pages in either arm are logged, and links between a rewritten page and its pair are reported, not corrected.
• Technical changes. A page is excluded, in either arm, only if during the windows it is redirected, merged, deleted, set to noindex, has its canonical changed or its URL moved. When a page leaves, its pair leaves too, and the number removed is published.
• Data gaps. If Search Console data is missing for part of a window, the gap is reported and the page stays in with the data it has.

Choosing which pages to test is a separate job from this protocol. The striking-distance Search Console workflow covers deciding which pages are worth rewriting at all, which matters on a real site where not every title should change. Here the rewrite is applied by random assignment, so the test does not choose pages for being promising.

What is documented and what is analysis?

The sources supply the figures and the testing advice quoted, and every design choice is the author's. The two lists keep them apart.

• Documented: Moz's 58% rewrite rate across 57,832 title tags, its 51 to 60 character finding, its 90% display figure, its rewrite factors, its H1 advice and its account of Google's title guidelines.
• Documented: Atticus Li's test method, with page groups of at least twenty, a baseline of at least two weeks, three to six weeks of measurement, server-side title changes, a log of original and new titles, and its list of metrics.
• Documented: the Mangools statement that more than 50% of Google searches are on mobile, and the root layout's " | Kanso" title template in this site's code.
• Documented: the number of articles in the /blogs listing and their dates, as of 28 October 2026.
• Analysis: the hypothesis, the 40-page minimum, the 8-week and 100-impression eligibility rules, the pairing method, the windows, the 10-point threshold, the 0.05 level and the rewrite checklist.
• Analysis: the 16 December 2026 earliest date, the scenario table, the reading of why a bundle cannot attribute an effect, and the point that mixed intent limits what a result can claim. All rest on invented numbers or the author's reasoning.
• Not supplied: any controlled result on title rewrites, any Google documentation on titles, any Search Console data for Kanso's pages, and any Kanso result. Two pages appeared in the search results supplied for this topic, a Searchpilot case study and a Search Engine Journal roundup of SEO experiments. We did not read either, and nothing here draws on them.

Where will the results appear, and what will they include?

Results will be added to this page, below the protocol and with their date, once the after window closes. No date is promised, because the freeze date and the edit date have not been set.

Whatever the verdict, the published result will include the page counts per arm, any exclusions, the difference with its permutation p-value, the secondary metrics, the display check and the per-page log of original and new titles. If the test cannot run or ends inconclusive, that goes on this page too. A hub for experiment logs is planned but not published yet, so there is nothing to link.

Title tag testing: frequently asked questions

Sources

• What Are Title Tags? [Plus FREE Meta Title Preview Tool], Moz, updated 18 March 2025, retrieved 28 October 2026
• SERP Simulator: Free SERP Snippet Preview Tool, Mangools, retrieved 28 October 2026
• Title Tag A/B Testing: How to Test Meta Titles for SEO, Atticus Li, retrieved 28 October 2026