Title Tags

What we measured

We ran a title audit across all 216 of our own exported pages. Zero pages are missing a title, zero have more than one, and among indexable pages zero titles are duplicated. The two findings are both non-defects: /404 and /_not-found share a title and are both noindex, which is a framework artifact rather than a mistake, and one indexable title runs 65 characters against a 60 character guideline that is not a limit.

Why it matters

• The title is usually the first thing a person reads about your page, before they have seen the page at all. It is doing sales work, not just classification.
• Two pages with the same title are two pages competing to be the same result. Search engines have to pick one, and the choice may not be yours.
• A template that emits one title for a whole section is the common cause, which means the fix is one change rather than fifty.
• It is one of the few things you control completely, right up until Google decides to rewrite it.

The failure

// src/app/services/[slug]/page.tsx
export const metadata = {
  title: "Services | Axion Deep Digital",
};

// Every service page now ships the same title:
//   /services/technical-seo   -> "Services | Axion Deep Digital"
//   /services/web-design      -> "Services | Axion Deep Digital"
//   /services/local-seo       -> "Services | Axion Deep Digital"

The fix

export async function generateMetadata({ params }) {
  const { slug } = await params;
  const service = getService(slug);
  return {
    title: { absolute: `${service.name} | Axion Deep Digital` },
  };
}

Verify the fix

Changing the code is not the same as fixing the problem. Confirm it.

1. Run the script against your rendered output. Templates decide titles, so the source will not tell you what actually shipped.
2. Treat a duplicate as a finding only when more than one indexable page shares the title. Noindex pages cannot compete with each other.
3. For anything flagged LONG, look at the title before changing it. 60 characters is a display guideline, not a limit, and a clear 65 character title beats a truncated-sounding 58 character one.
4. Check that each title describes its own page rather than the site. A title that is unique and still says nothing passes the script and fails the reader.
5. Compare against what Google actually displays, using Search Console or a site: query. Google rewrites titles routinely, and a rewrite is a signal your title did not match the query as well as the page did.

import re, glob, collections

titles = collections.defaultdict(list)

for f in sorted(glob.glob("out/**/*.html", recursive=True)):
    html = open(f, encoding="utf-8", errors="ignore").read()
    if "<html" not in html:
        continue
    path = "/" + f[len("out/"):].replace(".html", "")
    noindex = 'content="noindex' in html
    found = re.findall(r"<title>(.*?)</title>", html, re.S)

    if not found:
        print("NO TITLE", path, "(noindex)" if noindex else "(INDEXABLE)")
        continue
    if len(found) > 1:
        print("MULTIPLE TITLES", path, len(found))

    title = found[0].replace("&amp;", "&").strip()
    titles[title].append((path, noindex))
    if len(title) > 60:
        print("LONG", len(title), path, "(noindex)" if noindex else "(INDEXABLE)")

for title, pages in titles.items():
    indexable = [p for p, ni in pages if not ni]
    if len(indexable) > 1:
        print("DUPLICATE across", len(indexable), "indexable pages:", title)
        for p in indexable:
            print("   ", p)

Exceptions and misconceptions

Watch it

Primary sources

• Google Search Central: influencing title links in search results
• WHATWG HTML Standard: the title element
• MDN: the title element

The measurement above comes from our study, State of Small Business Websites 2026.

Related lessons

• Canonical URLs
• H1 Tags

Last reviewed 2026-09-17. Checks covered: Title Tag, Multiple Title Tags, Title Duplicates.