How to audit an Amazon listing: the 2026 checklist

Count the characters, spaces included, against the 75-character cap in force since 27 July 2026. Media categories are exempt; everything else is not.

Check that the words a buyer would actually type come before the ones only you care about, and that the brand is not eating characters it will lose anyway.

Compare the title you submitted with the title Amazon displays. A gap between them means the rewrite has already started on that listing.

Five bullets, each describing a verifiable attribute: material, dimensions, compatibility, what is in the box. Vague superlatives cost you twice, once with the buyer and once with the AI layer that reads the listing.

Item Highlights (125 characters) is where the detail the title can no longer hold belongs. An empty Item Highlights field is indexed space you are not using.

Measure the true UTF-8 byte count, not the character count, against the 249-byte limit. Accents and non-Latin characters take more than one byte.

Remove anything already in the title, any competitor brand, and any repetition. What is left is the space for the queries you do not yet cover.

Main image on pure white, plus detail, scale, contents and in-use views. Resolution high enough for zoom.

The image set decides click-through, and click-through decides where the listing sits. An SEO audit that stops at text is half an audit.

GPSR: a named EU Responsible Person reachable by the consumer, manufacturer identity, and safety information in the language of the marketplace.

EPR: packaging registration in every EU country you sell into or store stock in. Since 12 August 2026 marketplaces verify this per country of sale, and Pan-EU sellers are caught most often because stock is placed in countries they never chose.

These are the checks that take a listing offline rather than down a few positions, which is why they rank above keyword work when both are failing.

An audit is a snapshot of a moving target. Two rule changes landed in the summer of 2026 alone, and neither was announced to sellers individually.

Whatever you use to audit, the useful cadence is continuous rather than annual: the cost of finding out late is a suppressed listing, not a lower rank.