Hi everyone—jumping into this thread to share some advice on site names in Google search. As Google points out in their documentation, site name selection is completely automated and Square does not have any direct control over it. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/site-names
The SEO feature automatically suggests a site name to the Google crawlers, but they can reject it and use a different one.
Key signals and where to edit them
WebSite structured‑data (name, alternateName)
Add a JSON‑LD block on your home page. Keep name to your canonical brand and place acronyms or nicknames in alternateName.
Square Online: Settings → Site Markup → Header — paste your JSON‑LD snippet here. See an example snippet at the end of my post.
Open Graph og:site_name meta tag
Social platforms use it; Google treats it as a strong secondary hint.
Square Online: Marketing → SEO → Social Share → Site Name.
Home‑page <title> tag
Put the brand first, followed by a brief descriptor if you really need one.
Square Online: Site Preferences → SEO → Homepage Title.
Visible on‑page elements
<h1>, logo ALT text, and footer copyright should match the brand string word‑for‑word.
Square Online: In the Site Editor, update Header → Logo → ALT Text and the main Heading section to set the H1.
Anchor text from inbound links
Consistent anchor text across other sites reinforces your chosen brand.
For external sites you’ll need to request updates from those site owners directly. For internal links you can use Site Editor → Navigation to align internal link labels.
Reasons why a site name might be rejected
Longer than 32 characters → Google shows the bare domain.
Generic words like “Home” or keyword‑stuffed phrases are discarded.
Profanity, potential trademark conflicts, or possible spam are filtered.
If no candidate name survives, that's whe you’ll generally just see the raw domain (example.com).
If you notice that:
Only the domain shows: There's probably something wrong with your suggested name. It may be too long, or repetitive with some other site, or not true to your brand. Once you fix any issues, request a recrawl using Google Search Console
Name keeps changing
Conflicting signals or inconsistent anchor text. Standardise your name across the touchpoints above and update any inbound links that you control
TL;DR — use your own custom domain name, and, provide Google a single <32‑character brand string that's unique to your site and consistently across structured data, meta tags, visible headings and external links for the best chance of updating the Site Name in Google search.
Example JSON-LD snippet
Here’s an example of how this might work for https://www.weirdandfantastic.com using the site name “Word Horde Emporium" (note that this is under the recommended 32 characters.
Place this in Settings → Site Markup → Header:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "WebSite",
"@id": "https://www.weirdandfantastic.com/#website",
"url": "https://www.weirdandfantastic.com/",
"name": "Word Horde Emporium",
"alternateName": "WHE"
}
</script>Hope this helps!
