page-title-patterns
Page title patterns that may be insufficiently descriptive
Identifies page title patterns that may indicate low descriptiveness, such as generic, duplicated, or overly templated titles. This rule provides review signals and does not fail automatically.
Applies to. Applies to a run over a whole document whose <title> resolves to non-empty text; a missing or empty title is page-title-present's failure, not a pattern to review. A run narrowed by contextSelector or by engineOptions.fragment is notApplicable, as is a title matching none of the patterns below.
Expectation. The title carries none of the conservative low-descriptiveness signals: one of the generic titles home, homepage, welcome, untitled, page or document; fewer than eight characters; or a template shape pairing a generic token with a brand, such as "Home | Brand". When the crawl.pageTitles probe supplies at least ten pages, cross-page signals are used instead: one title repeated across distinct URLs, or a prefix or suffix of twelve characters or more shared across the set. Every signal is reported as cantTell: whether a title describes its page is a judgment, so the rule never fails on a pattern alone.
Examples
<title>Home</title>
"Home" is one of the conservative generic-title signals this rule reviews.
<title>Quarterly Sales Report — Q3 2026</title>
The title is specific to the page's content, matching none of the low-descriptiveness patterns.