In the Shortest Common Superstring problem (SCS), one is given a finite set of strings and is asked to find a shortest string containing every input string as a substring. Its best known approximation ratio is $2.466$, whereas the currently strongest upper bound on the approximation guarantee of the maximum-overlap greedy algorithm is $3.396$ (Englert, Matsakis, and Vesel{\'y}, 2023), though it is conjectured to be 2. We improve both approximation guarantees: SCS admits a $\frac{7}{3}$-approximation and the approximation guarantee of the greedy algorithm is at most $3$.

The main technical ingredient of our proof is a certain inequality for optimum cycle covers of an overlap graph associated with the input strings. Every previous improvement of greedy's worst-case guarantee and the two recent record guarantees for general SCS are driven by it. We improve this inequality by pushing it to its limit: for a particular coefficient of this inequality, we show a new upper bound and prove that it cannot be improved further.