Item Highlights: The 125 Characters Most Sellers Are Wasting

The 75-character title cap got all the attention, and understandably — it is the visible, alarming half of the change. The quieter half is more useful.

Alongside the shorter title, Amazon introduced item highlights: a separate field holding up to 125 characters, indexed for search. Both fields are indexed, and neither is reported to take priority over the other.

That matters enormously, because it means the terms you had to cut out of your title did not have to be thrown away. They had somewhere to go.

Most sellers we have looked at since the change did not move them. They deleted them.

The arithmetic

Old title: up to about 200 characters of indexed text.

New arrangement: 75 in the title, 125 in item highlights. Two hundred characters, split across two fields.

You have not really lost indexed space. You have lost the ability to put all of it in the headline — which was always a bad idea for the human reading it, and is now simply not an option.

The sellers being hurt by this change are the ones who treated it as a deletion exercise. The sellers who did well out of it treated it as a filing exercise.

What belongs in which field

Title — the 75. Brand, the noun, the governing number, the one differentiator. This is what a person reads in a search result and often the only thing they read.

Item highlights — the 125. Material and construction. Compatibility. Secondary specifications. Use cases. Certifications worth naming. The terms a buyer might search but would not read as a headline.

A worked example. Before:

HydroPeak Premium Quality Stainless Steel Double Wall Vacuum Insulated Water Bottle, 750ml Leak Proof Sports Flask, Keeps Drinks Cold 24 Hours, BPA Free, Gym Hiking Travel

Split properly:

Title (65): HydroPeak 750ml Insulated Water Bottle, Cold 24 Hours, Leak Proof

Item highlights (111): Double-wall vacuum stainless steel. BPA free. Fits a standard cup holder. Built for the gym, hiking and travel.

Nothing was lost. "Stainless steel", "BPA free", "gym", "hiking", "travel" are all still indexed. They are just no longer competing with the headline for the buyer's one second of attention.

The mistakes we are already seeing

Repeating the title in the highlights. If a word is in the title, spending highlight characters on it again buys nothing and runs into the repetition rule. The highlights are for what the title could not carry.

Writing it as marketing prose. This is not a second title and it is not a bullet. Short declarative statements outperform a flowing sentence, and they fit more.

Leaving it empty. By far the most common. An empty item-highlights field is 125 characters of indexed space you are choosing not to use while complaining that your title got shorter.

Stuffing it. The temptation is to treat it as the new backend keyword field. It is customer-facing. Fill it with comma-separated keywords and buyers will read them.

How to work through a catalogue

For each listing, in this order:

1. Write the 75-character title first, from scratch, not by trimming. Trimming preserves the old bad order.
2. List everything the old title contained that did not make it.
3. Cut anything from that list that is already in the new title.
4. Cut anything nobody would search for. "Premium quality" is not a search term.
5. What remains, in short statements, up to 125 characters.

Doing it in that order takes a few minutes per listing and produces something markedly better than editing the old title down.

Worth checking before you start

Character counts include spaces, in both fields. Our title checker counts the title half; for the highlights field the same 125-character discipline applies, and the same rule about not repeating a word more than twice.

The change is only a loss if you treat it as one. Two fields, correctly filled, is a better listing than one field with everything crammed into it ever was.