Etsy Gives Guidance On Listing Best Practices, Nudges Sellers To Use New AI Tool To Optimize Titles
Etsy is introducing updated guidance for listing best practices, nudging sellers to use new AI tool to help optimize item titles.
The updates were posted this week in Etsy's Seller Handbook.
New Guidance for Listing Titles, and a Tool to Help
Today, we’re sharing updated guidance for what makes a great listing title to help you write clear, buyer-friendly titles that also help you reach relevant buyers in search results.We’re also introducing a new, optional tool that uses your current listing information to recommend titles that match this guidance—and helps you update multiple listings at once.
Here's what Etsy now says makes for a great title:
- Clearly state the item for sale, like “mug” or “dress”
- Include the most important traits upfront, like your item’s color, material, and size
- Streamline for clarity and scannability. Consider using less than 15 words when including the traits that make your item special.
- Only include holidays, special occasions, or recipient types if they’re essential to what the item is, like “birthday candle” or “Halloween costume”
- Move subjective words, like “perfect” or “beautiful,” to the description
- Try not to repeat words
- Don’t worry about adding info about price, shipping, or sales. Etsy helps take care of this by badging your items in Search.
They also provided some before and after examples of titles optimized with the new guidance applied.
To help streamline the process of applying the suggested new guidance, Etsy is rolling out a new AI tool for updating listing titles.
A new tool to easily update your listing titles
To help make it easier and faster to apply this new guidance, we've created an optional AI-powered tool that suggests updated listing titles using your current title, first photo, and description. You can:
- Quickly update one or many listings at the same time
- Accept our suggestions or customize them to fit your style, with real-time feedback to guide your edits
You can also skip our suggestions altogether and write your own updated title from scratch—it’s up to you. Try it out and see what works best for your listings.
The new AI tool is currently only available to a small number of sellers at this time, but Etsy plans to expand it to all sellers over the coming weeks.
However, experienced sellers like Pam Duthie are encouraging sellers to think carefully before diving into updating their titles this way, suggesting slowly changing a few items at time then gauging whether the new title really performs better or not in search before making significant changes to all your listings.
The move comes as Etsy continues to insert AI into more places across both the buyer and seller experience on the platform, recently publishing their statement of AI Principles for Keeping Human Connection At The Center Of Innovation and exploring how context engineering can turn generic LLMs into highly specific AI answer engines - with a little help from employee handbooks and the Etsy seller community forum.
Liz Morton
What do you think of Etsy's new guidance for listing title and will you use the AI tool to help update your listings once it is available? Let us know in the comments below!
