Google's own Merchant Center documentation puts the product title limit at 150 characters. Search for "Google Shopping title character limit" and you will find 200, confidently, across guide after guide. One of those numbers came from the company that enforces it. The other got copied.
The short version: marketplace listing limits are published mostly by people who did not check them, and the errors compound because each guide cites the last one. Below are the numbers we verified, where each came from, how confident we are in each — and the one limit we deliberately refuse to publish because we could not confirm it at the source. If you generate listings with AI, this matters more than it used to: a model trained on those same guides will repeat the wrong number back to you with total confidence.
What is the Google Shopping title character limit?
150 characters, with descriptions at 5,000. This one is not ambiguous — it is in Google's own product data specification, which is the only source that can settle it. We mark this rule primary confidence in our data because it came from the enforcing party, not from someone summarising them. If a guide tells you 200, it is describing a limit Google does not document.
What is the Amazon title character limit in 2026?
75 characters for most categories, and here I have to be honest about our own footing: we mark this one secondary. Amazon's Seller Central style guides sit behind a login, so we could not read the rule at the source. What we could read is Amazon's own forum announcement covering the character and word-repetition rules — that part is primary. The 75-character cap itself, and whether it applies uniformly or varies by category, we take from secondary reporting and flag as unresolved in our own tracker.
Two related rules are firmer, because they came from that forum post: special characters are allowed only as part of a brand name, and no word may repeat more than twice, with prepositions, articles and conjunctions exempt. Search terms are also measured in bytes, not characters — 249 of them — which is a distinction that quietly breaks any listing containing accented or non-Latin text.
What is the Walmart title character limit?
We do not publish one. Not because we did not look — because we looked and could not verify it, and a confident wrong cap is worse for a seller than an honest gap. Guides will tell you 50–75 recommended and 100 maximum. We could not trace that to Walmart, so our rules table stores nothing for that field, and a test asserts it stays empty so nobody helpfully fills it in with a guess later.
What we can state: Walmart's Listing Quality Score runs 0–100, and from 1 September 2026, listings scoring under 70 have payouts reduced by up to 3%. We also do not score listings against a target LQS number, because Walmart's documentation says the algorithm differs by category and declines to publish the weights. Scoring you against an invented threshold would be theatre.
Why do the guides disagree?
Because a character limit is cheap to publish and expensive to verify. The vendor documentation is often login-walled, occasionally contradicts itself, and changes without announcement — Amazon re-cut its titles in July 2026. So one article guesses, twenty cite it, and a year later the wrong number is the consensus. eBay is our favourite example of the mess: the documented cap is 80 characters, while eBay's own listing tool reportedly recommends 55. We store 80 and keep the contradiction flagged as open rather than resolving it by preference.
What this means if you generate listings with AI
A language model learned these limits from the same guides. Ask one for the Google Shopping title cap and there is a good chance you get 200 — stated flatly, with no hedge, because confident phrasing is what these models are shaped to produce, not calibrated uncertainty. That is the failure mode: not that AI invents a number from nothing, but that it faithfully repeats the internet's most-repeated wrong one.
The defence is the same one that works for every other AI claim — check it against the source that can enforce it. For listing rules that means the merchant documentation, the seller forum, the policy page. Not the tenth guide on page one.
What we actually maintain
Every marketplace rule in Skryvo carries three fields alongside the number: the URL we read it from, the date we read it, and whether that source was primary or secondary. Ten platforms, each with its own field limits, banned characters, required attributes and structure. Tests enforce the discipline — one asserts every rule has a source URL and a verification date that is not in the future, another asserts the Walmart title stays absent, another pins Google to its own 150 rather than the internet's 200.
It is unglamorous, and it is the entire point. A listing generator that writes past a real limit produces copy you cannot publish; one that writes to an invented limit produces copy you can publish and should not. So the rules are versioned, sourced and dated, and where we do not know, our answer is that we do not know. You can see the current numbers in the product — the free plan grades listings without charging a generation, so you can check your own against them.
Before you trust any character limit — ours included — ask where it came from and when. If the answer is another guide, it is not a limit. It is a rumour with a number in it.
Write content you can publish with confidence
Skryvo generates, fact-checks, and scores your content — try it free.
