What happens to your title
The text is lowercased, then a small set of Latin characters that do not decompose cleanly is expanded by hand. The German sharp s becomes ss, the ae and oe ligatures become ae and oe, the Scandinavian slashed o and ring a become o and a, and the crossed d, eth, thorn, crossed l, and dotless i become d, d, th, l, and i.
The text is then normalized and combining accent marks are stripped, which is what turns é into e, ñ into n, ü into u, and ç into c. Anything left that is not a lowercase letter or a digit becomes a hyphen, runs of those collapse into one hyphen, and hyphens at the start and end are trimmed off.
The result is a slug made only of a to z, 0 to 9, and single hyphens, which is what every content system and every web server will accept without complaint.
- Lowercased, then special Latin characters expanded
- Accents removed by Unicode normalization
- Everything else becomes a single hyphen
- Leading and trailing hyphens trimmed
Non-Latin text produces an empty slug
This is the one behavior worth knowing before you paste. There is no transliteration table beyond those ten Latin characters, so Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters do not become their Latin equivalents. They fall outside the a to z and 0 to 9 keep set and are replaced with hyphens, which then get trimmed away.
The practical result is that a title written entirely in Cyrillic gives you an empty slug, and a mixed title gives you only the Latin parts. If you publish in a non-Latin script, write the slug from a translated or transliterated version of the title rather than pasting the original.
Emoji behave the same way. They are stripped rather than named, which is what you want in a URL.
What a good slug looks like
The tool cleans the characters, but it does not edit for you, and slug quality is mostly an editing question. Short beats long: a slug of three to five meaningful words reads better in a search result and survives being pasted into a chat without wrapping. A slug that is the entire headline is a slug nobody reads.
Filler words are the usual culprit. A title like "The 10 Best Ways to Do the Thing in 2026" becomes the-10-best-ways-to-do-the-thing-in-2026, where the, to, and in carry nothing. Trim them by hand before or after converting. Dropping the year is also worth considering, since a slug with a year in it dates the page permanently even after you refresh the content.
Whatever you decide, decide it once. A slug is effectively permanent, because changing it later means either breaking every existing link to the page or maintaining a redirect. The separator is a hyphen here and not configurable, which matches what search engines have long treated as a word separator.
- Aim for three to five meaningful words
- Cut filler words like the, a, to, and in
- Think twice before putting a year in the slug
- Settle on the slug before the page is published