So now there are some SEOs asking if it makes sense for you to replace your HTML title tag with the title Google selected to show in the Google search results. John Mueller from Google said no, don’t just do that blindly – if it makes things better for your users, sure but don’t assume Google’s algorithms are right here.

John said “just because one algorithm selects something as a title doesn’t mean it’s a better title.” “There are certainly also situations where maybe Google’s algorithms select the a worse title and where you want to keep the one that you had there,” John added.

Here was the question:

We wondered if we changed the page title tag to match what Google is now dynamically selecting in the HTML would this negatively affect SEO? Ultimately we want to know if the HTML title tag would still add SEO benefit even if it was not being selected for display.

Now, we know this title change does not impact rankings. John responded:

I think we touched upon this briefly it’s it still matters the title tag still works for ranking purposes. Changing it to what Google has selected from from my point of view doesn’t automatically make sense because just because one algorithm selects something as a title doesn’t mean it’s a better title. But maybe there are cases where Google’s algorithms have selected a better title and where it makes sense to kind of go in that direction. But there are certainly also situations where maybe Google’s algorithms select the a worse title and where you want to keep the one that you had there or maybe you even want to improve the one that you had previously. So I wouldn’t just blindly use what we show in search and say that’s got to be the best title because Google’s algorithms know everything better. And it’s not the case that Google’s algorithms know everything better.

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.

Update, here is another place John said this today:

I wouldn’t copy what our agorithms do (unless you like it better :-)), and if we can swap it out, I’d assume we’re recognizing it anyway, so I don’t think we’d need to change the doc for that (maybe there are other aspects to edit though, I haven’t checked in detail).

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 31, 2021