I Tracked 997 Chrome Extensions That Changed Their Titles
The author analyzed 997 Chrome extensions to determine the impact of title changes on search rankings. The study found that changing a title makes rankings 4x more likely to shift, with roughly equal odds of gaining or losing visibility.
Why it matters
It provides empirical data for developers on the risks and rewards of A/B testing metadata in the Chrome Web Store.
The best way I've found to learn Chrome extension growth is watching what other developers actually do — and what happens to them after. Problem is, you normally only get to see your own experiments. I wanted to see everyone's.
So early on while building my rankings tracker, I started logging daily Chrome Web Store search rankings for a couple thousand keywords, plus every listing change from the extensions showing up in them. Since early March, 997 out of the ~25,000 extensions in that dataset changed their title at some point. That's about 50 title experiments a week, running in public — and almost nobody reads the results, including the developers who ran them.
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