Hi everyone,
Here is a question very few businesses ever think about: if you only got one line to explain what you do and why someone should choose you, what would you cut?
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Most owners have never had to answer it. There has always been room for one more sentence, another bullet, another paragraph on the About page. Nothing forced a decision, so no decision got made.
Your customers have been answering it for you the whole time. They only ever read the first line.
Now the platforms are enforcing it.
The specific thing that happened
On July 27, Amazon cut product titles to 75 characters across every category except media. They used to allow 200. Amazon’s stated reason is that long titles get truncated on phones anyway, so the limit matches what shoppers actually see.
They also added a second field, Item Highlights, worth another 125 characters, written as comma-separated phrases rather than sentences.
If you sell on Amazon, that is a project sitting on your desk right now. But that is not why I am writing about it.
Amazon is the last one to do this, not the first
Look at what you actually get on every surface your business shows up on:
A Google search result shows roughly the first 50 to 60 characters of your page title. Google measures pixels, not letters, so there is no exact number, but that is the working range.
A Google search ad gives you 30 characters per headline and 90 per description. Those are hard caps.
A Facebook or Instagram ad shows about 125 characters of your main text before it hides the rest behind “See more.” The field will accept thousands. It just stops showing them.
An email subject line on a phone shows somewhere around 30 to 40 characters, depending on the app. You tested this one already this morning, on this email.
An AI answer does something different, and it is worse. It does not cut you off. It reduces you to a clause inside a list of five companies, or it leaves you out and nobody tells you.
That last one is the direction all of this is heading. Everywhere else, you get a shortened version of what you wrote. In an AI answer, you get whatever it decided you are, in about eight words, sitting next to four competitors.
The part that costs money
Go read what survives the cut on your own listings and pages, and notice what made it through.
For most businesses it is the category and the location. “Plumbing Services in Portsmouth NH.” “Leather Office Chair, Black, Adjustable.” Accurate, and completely interchangeable with every competitor.
What almost never survives is the reason someone should choose you. That sits in the second half of the sentence, or on the second line, or three paragraphs down the About page. It is real, you paid someone to write it, and no customer has ever seen it.
That is not a character count problem. It is a question of whether you know what your one line is. When you do, the platforms stop being a constraint, because you were only ever going to need the first six words.
Two things you can check in five minutes
One. Search your own business name and read only what is visible before the cut.
Not the whole title tag in your website admin. What Google actually shows. Then ask whether a stranger reading that line has any reason to pick you over the result above you.
Two. Write what you sell in 75 characters.
Not a tagline. What it is, and why yours. If it takes you three attempts, that is the finding, and it is the same problem showing up in your Amazon title, your ad headline, and every AI answer about you.
If both of those come back fine, you are in better shape than most and you can stop reading.
If they did not, the other five surfaces are worth walking through, along with what to actually do when the answer is no. I had the team write it up.
Talk soon,
Iulia Vasciuc
CEO, ScaledOn
P.S. If you run a college or a continuing education program, this one is for you specifically. On Thursday, August 20 at 12pm ET, our founder Alec and our Lead SEO Strategist Adrian get into why prospects are removing programs from their list based on what AI told them, and what to do about it. Our team is live in the chat taking questions during the premiere. Save your spot →
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