Google Forms: the title vs the file name

Last updated September 2026 · ~7 minute read

Short answer: a Google Form carries two names, not one. There is the title printed at the top of the form that responders read, and there is the file name the form has in Google Drive. Google's own Forms API keeps them as separate fields — info.title and info.documentTitle — so a single form can be “Staff Satisfaction Survey” to the people filling it in and “Untitled form” in your Drive at the same time.

Almost nobody discovers this on purpose. It surfaces when a link you shared looks wrong, when a response spreadsheet turns up under a name you do not recognise, or when a colleague cannot find the form you told them to search for. One string moved and the other did not.

Where Google actually spells this out

Not in the help centre. The clearest statement Google publishes is in the Forms API reference, where a form's info object has two title fields and the documentation defines them differently:

title — “Required. The title of the form which is visible to responders.”
documentTitle — “Output only. The title of the document which is visible in Drive. If Info.title is empty, documentTitle may appear in its place in the Google Forms UI and be visible to responders.”

That is the whole distinction, stated by Google, in Google's words. One string is the form's public header; the other is the Drive file's name. The API even confirms that the two can be filled in independently at birth: its forms.create page says “Only the form.info.title and form.info.document_title fields are copied to the new form.” Two fields, both settable, both accepted.

Does renaming one rename the other?

For the web editor, Google does not publish an answer, and we are not going to supply one from memory. Its How to use Google Forms page gets as far as the instruction “Name your untitled form” and stops. Its file-handling page for the Docs editors gives rename steps — “Click the name at the top of the file,” “Type a new name,” “Press Enter” — and lists the defaults it applies (“Untitled document,” “Untitled spreadsheet,” “Untitled presentation” or “Untitled video”) without naming Forms in either list. Nowhere does Google state what typing in the form's header does to the Drive file name, or the reverse.

What is documented is the programmatic side, and it is unambiguous: documentTitle is marked output only, it “can be set on create, but cannot be modified by a batchUpdate request,” and the reference tells developers to “use the Google Drive API if you need to programmatically update documentTitle.” In other words, at the API level the two names are reached through two different services: the responder-facing title through the Forms API, the file name through Drive. Nothing about that design suggests one write silently performs the other.

So treat them as independent until you have seen otherwise on your own form. The check takes ten seconds: rename the thing you want renamed, then open the form's live responder link and read the header. If the header still says what it said before, you have just renamed a file and nothing else.

What the responder sees

The responder gets the form's title, printed above the description at the top of the page. They never see your Drive file name — with one documented exception, which is the useful part: if Info.title is empty, Google says documentTitle “may appear in its place in the Google Forms UI and be visible to responders.” A blank header is the one condition under which your filing name leaks out to the people filling in the form.

That is worth remembering next time a respondent reports seeing a name you thought was private — an internal code, a client's name, a draft label. The fix is to give the form a real header title rather than to rename the file.

The untitled default

Google's instruction for a brand-new form is a single imperative: “Name your untitled form.” That is the whole of the published guidance, and it is aimed at the header title in the editor. It says nothing about the file in Drive, which is why so many accounts contain a run of forms that are properly titled when opened and indistinguishable in a file list.

If your Drive is full of near-identical entries, the file names are what you are looking at, and the file names are what you have to fix. Renaming them is a Drive operation on a Drive property — the form's contents and its link are untouched by it.

Browser tabs, link previews and the response spreadsheet

Three places people expect one of these names to appear, and what Google actually commits to in writing:

Those three “not documented” rows are genuine gaps, not laziness on our part. You will find plenty of blog posts confidently asserting that the spreadsheet is always named after the form with “(Responses)” appended; Google's own page on choosing a response destination does not say so. The API, characteristically, is more careful: it exposes the link as an id — linkedSheetId, “the ID of the linked Google Sheet which is accumulating responses from this Form” — and makes no claim about that sheet's name at all.

If the name of the response sheet matters to you, open it once after linking and rename it. It is a Sheets file like any other, and renaming it does not disturb the form feeding it.

Which name are you actually trying to change?

• “Respondents are seeing the wrong name.” That is the title. Edit the header at the top of the form in the editor.
• “I cannot find this form in my Drive.” That is the file name. Rename the file; the form's link, questions and responses are unaffected.
• “Both are wrong.” Change both, deliberately, and verify each one where it lives — the live link for the title, the file list for the name.
• “It says untitled even though I named it.” Check whether the header title is empty: that is the documented condition under which the Drive name shows through.

None of this changes the form's identity. The API reference describes formId and responderUri as output-only properties of the form, separate from either name — which is the formal way of saying that a rename never breaks a link you have already shared.

How Forms+ handles the two names

Forms+ keeps them visibly distinct rather than pretending there is one name. Renaming a form from the All Forms list opens a dialog headed Rename file that states in the dialog itself: “This changes the form's file name in Google Drive and your forms list (not the form's header title).” It performs that rename through the Drive API, because the Forms API refuses to modify documentTitle after creation — exactly the restriction Google documents.

Editing the header title is the other operation, done in the editor, and it writes the form's title field and only that field. The one moment the two are set together is when you create a form in the app: Forms+ sends the name you typed as both title and documentTitle, so a new form starts life with its header and its file name in agreement. After that, each is yours to change separately.

Frequently asked questions

Is a Google Form's title the same as its file name in Drive?

No. They are two separate fields. Google's Forms API documents title as “The title of the form which is visible to responders” and documentTitle as “The title of the document which is visible in Drive”. A form can hold two different strings at once, and usually does after someone edits one of them.

Does renaming a Google Form in Drive change what responders see?

Google does not publish an answer for the web editor, so we will not invent one. What is documented is the API: documentTitle is output only, it “can be set on create, but cannot be modified by a batchUpdate request”, and Google tells developers to use the Drive API to change it. Writing the Drive file name and writing the responder-facing title are two different calls to two different APIs. Open your form's live link after any rename and read the header for yourself.

Why does my form show a name I did not type at the top?

One documented cause is an empty header title. Google's API reference says that if Info.title is empty, documentTitle “may appear in its place in the Google Forms UI and be visible to responders” — so a form with a blank title falls back to showing its Drive file name. Check the header title first, before assuming the form is broken.