Amazon listing character counter

In the US, backend search terms have to be less than 250 bytes in total, so 249 is the most that fits. That comes from an Amazon staff reply in the Seller Forums and a 2018 Seller Central notice sellers quote there. The limit covers all your search term lines added together.

Plain letters, numbers and spaces are 1 byte each. Accented letters like é take 2, a symbol like € takes 3 and an emoji takes 4, so a field can look short and still be over.

What happens over the limit isn't settled. The 2018 notice says the field is cut to the first 249 bytes, and plenty of sellers say the whole field stops being indexed. The checker flags anything over 249 either way. Sellers report other limits in other marketplaces, so change it if you don't sell in the US.

Amazon's public pages don't give one number for bullets or the description, and sellers report different ones by category: 500, 256 or 200 characters per bullet, about 1,000 for all five together, and 2,000 for the description. The checker starts at 500, 1,000 and 2,000, labels them unverified, and lets you change each one to what your category's style guide in Seller Central says.

Line break tags in a description count toward its limit. Amazon only allows the line break tag in descriptions, and the product description formatter writes it for you from plain text.

Paste the keywords you care about and each one gets a status.

• Full phrase: the whole keyword appears, in order, in at least one field. Bullets are checked one at a time, so a phrase never spans two bullets.
• All words, split up: every word is in the listing somewhere, but apart or in another order.
• Some words, or missing: the listing has part of the keyword, or none of it. The words it lacks are listed by how many of your keywords use them.

Singular and plural count as the same word, and small words like "for" and "the" are ignored. To build or tidy the keyword list first, use the keyword processor.

Amazon's search terms guidance, as sellers quote it in the forums, says to separate words with spaces, skip punctuation, leave out repeats and stop words, and not to repeat words from your title or brand, which "will not improve your product placement."

The cleanup does that for you. It drops repeated words, words already in your title, highlights, bullets or description, and punctuation, then adds the words from your keyword list that the listing is missing while they fit under the limit. Check what it added before you paste it into Seller Central, and take out any other brand's name.