Build the SERP <title>. The executive-brief H1 — which the cascade has already localized into 14 languages — IS the SERP title. Per seo-metadata-contract.md §2.1, the title is always sourced from the executive brief (cleanArticleTitle strips boilerplate; titleFromBluf synthesises from BLUF when the H1 is unusable).
No date prefix (since 2026-05-24, audit on 480-article EN corpus):
198/480 (41%) of EN titles shipped with an ugly "Mon DD, 2026 · " prefix that ate ~15 chars of the 70-char SERP budget.
143/480 (30%) of EN titles shipped truncated mid-phrase (e.g. "Apr 19, 2026 · Deep Inspection HD03231 (Russia · Cyber · Defence ·…") when the bare H1 would have fit the budget cleanly.
The date is already carried by five other signals: the URL slug (2026-04-19-deep-inspection-en.html), og:article:published_time, JSON-LD datePublished, the visible page byline, and the SERP's own auto-rendered date snippet. Forcing the date into <title> is duplicative, destroys precious budget chars, and yields visually broken truncated titles.
Reader-friendly newsroom datelines remain on the <meta description> (see buildSeoDescription) — that's where the convention belongs.
Daily-series articles (election-cycle/current, year-ahead, …) that historically reused identical H1s across dates are now policed at the content layer (scripts/check-headline-quality.ts + brief generator prompts) — the renderer no longer papers over duplicate H1s by glue-mounting a date prefix on top.
Latin LTR (en sv da no fi de fr es nl) — 55-70 chars.
RTL (ar he) — 45-60 chars.
CJK (ja ko zh) — 30-45 glyphs.
Composition cascade (richest form first, fall back step by step):
{H1} — Riksdagsmonitor — story + brand (preferred).
{H1} — bare story (brand dropped to fit budget).
truncated {H1} with … ellipsis (last-resort).
Brand suffix is dropped when the H1 already mentions Riksdagsmonitor (avoid duplication). Empty-bracket artefacts left behind by upstream brief-generator template-substitution defects (( ), [ ], { - }) are scrubbed by stripEmptyBrackets before any length / truncation logic runs — see live regression on analysis/daily/2026-05-08/election-cycle/next/article.md which shipped title: "Post-2026 Coalition: Next Mandate 2026-2030 ( )".
Build the SERP
<title>. The executive-brief H1 — which the cascade has already localized into 14 languages — IS the SERP title. Perseo-metadata-contract.md§2.1, the title is always sourced from the executive brief (cleanArticleTitlestrips boilerplate;titleFromBlufsynthesises from BLUF when the H1 is unusable).No date prefix (since 2026-05-24, audit on 480-article EN corpus):
"Mon DD, 2026 · "prefix that ate ~15 chars of the 70-char SERP budget."Apr 19, 2026 · Deep Inspection HD03231 (Russia · Cyber · Defence ·…") when the bare H1 would have fit the budget cleanly.2026-04-19-deep-inspection-en.html),og:article:published_time, JSON-LDdatePublished, the visible page byline, and the SERP's own auto-rendered date snippet. Forcing the date into<title>is duplicative, destroys precious budget chars, and yields visually broken truncated titles.<meta description>(see buildSeoDescription) — that's where the convention belongs.scripts/check-headline-quality.ts+ brief generator prompts) — the renderer no longer papers over duplicate H1s by glue-mounting a date prefix on top.Per-language SERP budgets (
seo-metadata-contract.md§4):en sv da no fi de fr es nl) — 55-70 chars.ar he) — 45-60 chars.ja ko zh) — 30-45 glyphs.Composition cascade (richest form first, fall back step by step):
{H1} — Riksdagsmonitor— story + brand (preferred).{H1}— bare story (brand dropped to fit budget).{H1}with…ellipsis (last-resort).Brand suffix is dropped when the H1 already mentions
Riksdagsmonitor(avoid duplication). Empty-bracket artefacts left behind by upstream brief-generator template-substitution defects (( ),[ ],{ - }) are scrubbed by stripEmptyBrackets before any length / truncation logic runs — see live regression onanalysis/daily/2026-05-08/election-cycle/next/article.mdwhich shippedtitle: "Post-2026 Coalition: Next Mandate 2026-2030 ( )".