Yes, and not by a few characters. The old title-length playbook quietly assumed that ranking won the click; once an AI summary answers the query at the top of the page, that assumption no longer holds. When a searcher reads the answer in an AI Overview, a large share of them never click any result, including the one ranked first, because their question is already handled. Recent data shows a sharp drop in clicks on results when an AI summary is present, and informational “how to” queries are hit hardest while transactional searches are touched far less.
That changes what a title is for. It used to be a ranking cue and a topical label, and length advice was about fitting that label without truncation. Now the title’s harder job is to justify a click past an answer the searcher already has. A title that merely restates what the summary just said earns nothing, because the searcher has no reason to leave the page for a repeat. The title has to signal what your page offers beyond the summary: a specific angle, a tool or calculator, current data, proof, a real comparison, the depth the box left out. Length still matters in that it should not get clipped, but that is now secondary to giving a reason to leave the results page.
This behavior is moving fast, so treat any specific number, click rate, or pattern as something to re-check at production rather than a settled rule. The split between which queries get AI answers and which do not is shifting month to month.
The test for the next title is one question: why click this when the AI already gave me the answer? If the title cannot point past the summary to something the page uniquely delivers, the problem is not its length, it is that ranking above the summary no longer buys the click it once did.