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Ok... owning couple of dozen sites all submitted and fully indexed, I have never seen even single URL re-written. Does this really happen?

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Google claimed that the original <title> is used "more than 80% of the time" when announcing the change[0].

Combining this rate with the rate seen by the article (rewritten 61% of the time, on the subset of 81,000 URLs they were interested in), I'd guess that some websites see a lot of rewrites and many other websites see none at all.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/08/update-to-...

So an interesting distinction here is required! When Google says they use the title 80% of the time, they mean they use the title 80% of the time to create their search result title, which they may or may not modify. The other 20% of the time they use an H1 or other elements on the page.

Yes, happens 61% of the time.

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