Your Title Tag Is Being Rewritten. Write For the Rewrite.

You do not fully control how your page is titled in a search result any more, and you never control how it is described in a generated answer. Both are rewritten from your content when the original is judged unhelpful.

What gets rewritten and why

Google replaces a title tag when it thinks a better one exists on the page – typically when the tag is templated boilerplate, keyword-stuffed, far too long, or fails to describe what the page actually contains. An AI summary goes further: it describes the page in its own words entirely.

In both cases the rewrite is drawn from your page. So the practical question is not how to prevent it, but what the rewriter has to work with.

You cannot stop the rewrite. You can decide what it has to draw from.
– The Antimony position

What survives a rewrite

The entity name

A title naming the organisation gives the rewriter something it will usually keep, because it is the part that disambiguates. A title that could belong to any company in your category is the easiest thing to discard.

Specificity over cleverness

A pun survives nothing. A specific noun phrase – the actual subject, the actual number, the actual place – survives, because it is the load-bearing information.

A front-loaded subject

Truncation cuts from the end. Anything essential in the last third of a long title is optional as far as the result is concerned.

In practice: our own title failure

Our six category landing pages shipped with an internal build marker leaking into the title tag, so pages were publicly titled with a bracketed (LIVE) instead of their subject. Every category page in the sitemap advertised itself as a work-in-progress.

Fixing them was fast – they now read "Property Case Studies | Antimony Studio" with real meta descriptions. What was not fast was the correction reaching search results. Days after the fix, Google was still showing the old titles, because reindexing runs on its own schedule.

The general rule: title errors have a long tail. The cost is not the mistake, it is the lag between fixing it and the fix being visible – which is why titles deserve checking on publication rather than at the next audit. Check what is actually rendered on the live page, not what your CMS field says, since a template can inject anything between the two.

By the numbers

• 6 of 6 category pages publicly titled with an internal build marker.
• Days of lag before corrected titles replaced cached ones in results.
• 64.8% of searches ending without a click, which makes the title and description the whole impression for most searchers.

That last figure is the argument for taking titles seriously. For roughly two thirds of searches, the title and its summary are not a route to your page – they are the entire encounter.

How to write one that holds up

Name the specific subject in the first few words. Include the entity. Keep it short enough that nothing essential can be truncated. Skip the wordplay, and skip the templated suffix that appears identically on every page – it is the first thing a rewriter throws away.

Key takeaways

• Titles are rewritten from your page when judged unhelpful; summaries re-describe entirely.
• Entity name and specific subject survive; cleverness and boilerplate do not.
• Truncation cuts from the end – front-load the subject.
• Verify the rendered title on the live page, not the CMS field.
• Corrections lag in search results, so title errors are expensive for longer than they exist.

Appendix & sources

Definitions. Title tag: the HTML element defining a page's title. Reindexing: the process by which a search engine refreshes its stored copy.

1. Antimony Studio category page title audit and remediation, August–September 2026.
2. Zero-click data: Similarweb.