ChatGPT reads your whole page title, Google shows 60 characters

Google shows about 60 characters of a page title and replaces the rest with three dots. ChatGPT reads the whole title, even when it runs to 289 characters. And that is the mildest difference between the two machines.

Since 2023, OpenAI has been building its own search index, internally called Labrador, and it reads a page differently from Google. Olivier de Segonzac of Resoneo analyzed for Search Engine Land what actually lands there: 1,200 ChatGPT answers, 88,000 search results, 26,900 pages. Three findings affect every website directly.

The title arrives in full

The complete page title sits in the index, uncut. What Google truncates after 60 characters, ChatGPT reads to the end.

About 200 characters below the main heading

The index holds a ready-made snippet of roughly 200 characters of text, taken from directly below the main heading. In fast mode, that snippet plus title and URL is everything ChatGPT knows about the page, whatever someone asks. If the heading is followed by an author box, then the date, then "Share this article", that is exactly what ChatGPT has read. Nothing more.

No JavaScript, and 4 MB is the limit

The crawler does not execute JavaScript. Text that only appears in the browser does not exist for it. An HTML page over 4 MB gets a 400 error and is never taken in.

What you can check in your own source code

You do not need an AI visibility strategy for this. All three points are in the source code of your own page:

• How long is the title?
• What are the first 200 characters after the main heading?
• Is the text in the delivered HTML at all, or does it only arrive via JavaScript?

For the first two, the fix is a new paragraph and a new title. That is not a project. For the third, you at least know afterwards why ChatGPT has never heard of you.

To check whether the text is there without JavaScript: install the "Web Developer" browser extension, switch JavaScript off, reload the page. What remains is what ChatGPT sees. In Safari, view source only appears after enabling the Develop menu under Settings, Advanced.

Two machines, one title

Checking is easy. The decision behind it is not. A good first paragraph helps with Google just as much as with ChatGPT. The title is where it gets hard: a title that carries in ChatGPT looks like three dots in Google. You have to decide who you are writing it for.

How far apart the two machines are shows in a second analysis by Tomek Rudzki (Peec AI): only 33 percent of ChatGPT's results overlap with Google, 8 percent with Bing. The fundamentals are in Getting found in ChatGPT and Title and meta description.

Sources: Inside ChatGPT's retrieval stack, Search Engine Land, August 17, 2026, and ChatGPT hat einen eigenen Index, SEO Südwest, September 5, 2026 (German).