Amazon listing optimisation: 75-character titles, item highlights and bullets that convert

An Amazon product sells when two things happen: enough shoppers reach the page, and enough of those who arrive decide to buy. Advertising and ranking bring the first. The listing does most of the work on the second, and it also decides whether a shopper clicks on your result at all.

This guide covers the rules for each part of a listing on Amazon.co.uk as they stand today, after the biggest change to titles in years, and the craft that makes a compliant listing convert. It is about the listing itself. For how Amazon decides where a product ranks, see our guide to Amazon SEO; for how Amazon’s AI assistant reads it, see our companion guide to Rufus and Alexa for Shopping.

What changed for titles on 27 July 2026

Amazon’s UK help page now states the rule in one line: “Titles must not exceed 75 characters, including spaces.” It applies to all product types except media¹. Amazon announced the change in June 2026, saying it would apply from 27 July so that titles “fully display on mobile devices"².

Three details matter more than the number:

• Amazon rewrites titles that break the rule. “After July 27, any titles still over 75 characters will be updated to the AI recommendation gradually.” Listings stay active while this happens, and you can edit your title at any time².
• Brand owners get a window. They have 14 days before implementation to review, change or approve the AI-generated title and item highlights in Review Listing Changes². Anyone without that role should assume a rewrite can go live without a preview.
• Existing titles can be corrected for other reasons too. A title that breaks any requirement “or contains inaccurate information” might be corrected automatically or might not appear in search results¹.

The other title rules still apply on top of the limit¹:

The quickest way to test a title against all of these is the free listing checker, which runs in your browser and flags each rule separately.

How to shorten a title without losing search

A shorter title only costs you sales if a word that was bringing buyers disappears from the listing altogether. The job is to move words, not delete them.

1. Export every title over 75 characters, and sort by sales. Rewrite your best sellers by hand before Amazon’s model does it for you.
2. Find the words that earn purchases. In Brand Analytics, the Search Query Performance dashboard shows query volume, impressions, clicks, basket adds and purchases for the searches that lead to your products⁷. Your advertising search term reports add conversion by search term for paid traffic. Terms that convert in one and not yet in the other are worth testing in both. Our guide to Amazon keyword research covers the other sources.
3. Keep three things in the title: the brand, what the product is, and the one attribute a shopper filters on, such as size, pack count or model. Amazon’s help page recommends keeping “the most important variating attribute” in the title and moving the others to item highlights¹.
4. Move everything else, rather than cutting it, into item highlights, bullets or backend search terms.
5. Re-check the rules and review any AI recommendation Amazon offers in View enhancements before accepting it².

Item highlights: the new field under the title

Item highlights “provide an additional 125 characters for product details like materials or recommended use cases”, written “as comma-separated phrases, instead of full sentences"¹. They appear below the title in search results and on the product page, and Amazon says the content is searchable².

In practice we use them for what the title no longer has room for: materials, dimensions, compatibility, the situations the product is used in and who it is for. Write them for a shopper scanning a search results page on a phone. Don’t repeat the title, and don’t use them for claims you couldn’t put in a bullet.

Bullet points that pass the rules and sell

Amazon’s bullet point requirements are more detailed than most sellers realise³:

• At least three bullets, each 10 to 255 characters, starting with a capital letter, written as sentence fragments with no full stop at the end.
• A header with a colon followed by the description, for example “Cotton fabric: Made from 100% cotton”.
• Numbers one to nine written as words, except in names, model numbers and measurements, and a space between a number and its unit (“60 ml”). Note that this is the opposite of the title rule.
• Prohibited, and liable to be removed or edited: special characters such as ™ ® £ © and €, emoji, placeholder text such as “N/A”, ASINs, claims such as “eco-friendly”, “anti-bacterial” or “made from bamboo”, guarantee wording such as “full refund”, links or contact details, and the same information repeated across bullets.
• Avoid subjective, performance or comparative claims unless they are verifiable on the packaging, and don’t compare yourself with competitor brands.

Within those rules, the pattern that works best in the accounts we manage is benefit first, then the feature that delivers it, then something specific that makes it believable. The header carries the benefit; the rest earns it.

Where do the benefits come from? Your reviews. Read the last 50 to 100 for your product and for its closest competitors, and list what customers say it is used for, who uses it, where and with what. Customers often value something the listing never mentions: a scent that lasts, a size that fits hand luggage, a grandparent who can finally keep up on a walk. Put that first. Technical detail earns trust; the outcome a customer recognises from their own life earns the click on “Add to basket”.

Images: the click and the conversion

The main image decides whether a shopper clicks, and it has the strictest rules⁴. It needs a pure white background (RGB 255, 255, 255), the product must fill 85% of the image, and the whole product must be in frame, shown once. No text, badges, props that are not included, or packaging unless the packaging is part of the product. Images must be at least 500 pixels on the longest side; 1,000 pixels or more enables zoom, which is what we always supply.

Secondary images are where the listing does its selling. Our usual order is: what is in the box and its size, the main benefit shown in use, the answers to the two or three most common objections from reviews, a comparison across your range, and proof such as certifications you can substantiate. A+ content continues the story further down the page; Amazon says it “may result in higher conversion rates” and fewer negative reviews⁹, and our A+ content blueprint covers how to build it.

Backend search terms

Backend search terms are the hidden field for words shoppers use that don’t belong on the visible page: synonyms, spelling variations, abbreviations and alternative names. On Amazon.co.uk the field must be less than 250 bytes, and if it is over the limit, none of that ASIN’s search terms are indexed⁵. Leave out brand names, ASINs and words such as “new” or “best"⁵, and don’t repeat what is already in the title or item highlights. Our guide to Amazon backend search terms covers the full rules, how bytes are counted and worked examples.

Reviews: the conversion input you don’t write

Shoppers read reviews, and Amazon now summarises them. Its AI-generated review highlights show common themes from across a product’s reviews at a glance¹¹, and its shopping assistant answers product questions from your detail page and your reviews¹⁰. A recurring complaint therefore reaches far more shoppers than the few who scroll down to read it.

We treat review analysis as part of listing work. Each month, pull the recent one- to three-star reviews for your top products, group them by cause, and send each group to the right place: a product or packaging fix to the factory, a misunderstanding to the listing, a missing instruction to the insert. Then write the positive themes into your bullets and images, as above.

Measure conversion with the Business Report

Every change should be judged on one number per product. In Seller Central, open Reports, then Business Reports, and download Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item. Amazon defines Unit Session Percentage as the number of units purchased relative to the number of sessions, “expressed as a percentage"⁶.

Three cautions when you read it. It counts units, not orders, so a product often bought in twos looks better than it is. It falls when you lose the Featured Offer, which the same report shows as a separate percentage⁶, and that is a pricing or stock problem, not a copy problem; our guide to the Amazon Buy Box explains how to win it back. And it moves with traffic mix: a burst of broad advertising traffic lowers it without anything being wrong with the page.

The practical test is to compare each product with your own median, not an industry average.

This is exactly what the Deep X-Ray in our free Profit X-Ray does with your Business Report: it flags listings with real traffic that convert at least 20% below your own median and values the gap, lists products that get sessions but no sales, and shows where your Featured Offer percentage is low. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded.

Two further tools turn a guess into evidence. The Search Query Performance dashboard shows impressions, clicks, basket adds and purchases for the searches that lead to your products, and its Query Detail view compares your product with the top 10 products for that search⁷. If you are seen often but clicked rarely compared with those products, the problem is what shoppers see in search: main image, title, price or rating. If you win the click and lose the purchase, the problem is on the page. For brand owners with enough traffic, Manage Your Experiments runs A/B tests on six types of content, including images, titles, bullet points and A+ content⁸. Where you can’t run a test, change one thing at a time and compare equal periods before and after.

Conversion also feeds straight into advertising cost: a higher conversion rate lowers ACoS without touching a bid. Our guide to break-even ACoS shows the arithmetic.

Amazon listing optimisation (optimization) checklist

Whether you spell it optimisation or optimization, the work is the same. Use this list before you publish or rewrite a listing. Each line points to the rule above.

1. Featured Offer, price and stock checked first. A listing without the Featured Offer, or about to run out, won’t convert however good the copy is⁶.
2. Title of 75 characters or fewer, including spaces, with the brand, the product type and the one attribute shoppers filter on¹.
3. No prohibited characters (! $ ? _ { } ^ ¬ ¦), no word more than twice, no promotional phrases, numerals rather than words¹.
4. Item highlights filled, up to 125 characters of comma-separated phrases that don’t repeat the title¹.
5. At least three bullets of 10 to 255 characters, each with a header and a colon, benefit first, with no emoji, ™ ® £ ©, guarantees or claims such as “eco-friendly"³.
6. Main image on pure white (RGB 255, 255, 255), the product filling 85% of the frame, 1,000 pixels or more on the longest side for zoom⁴.
7. Secondary images in a deliberate order: what’s in the box, the main benefit in use, answers to the top objections, a range comparison, proof.
8. A+ content and a Brand Story published, if you are brand-registered⁹.
9. Backend search terms under 250 bytes, with no brand names or repeats⁵.
10. Reviews read for the last month, with complaints routed to a fix and praise written back into the page.
11. A baseline recorded: Unit Session Percentage for the four weeks before the change⁶, and an experiment set up where the product qualifies⁸.

The listing checker runs steps 2 to 5 in your browser.

When the listing isn’t the problem

Before you spend on new copy or images, look at the market. A long-established UK brand we spoke with had more than 100 separate listings, one for each scent and size. Their conversion was already high. What they lacked was traffic and order value, because every competitor above them had grouped scents and sizes into variation families that shared reviews and made it easy to buy more. New images would not have fixed that. A variation structure, sensible pricing across sizes and advertising built around it would.

So the order of work we follow is: check the Featured Offer, price and stock; check the structure of the range; then fix the main image and title for the click, and the images, bullets and A+ for the purchase; then measure. Run your titles and bullets through the listing checker first, and read our Rufus and Alexa for Shopping guide for how Amazon’s AI assistant reads the same page.