Why Are Recipe Blogs So Long?

You clicked a recipe for a weeknight pasta and got a memoir. A childhood in Italy, a farmers market, the light on a Tuesday afternoon, and finally, near the bottom, the recipe.

You are not imagining it, and we can put numbers on it.

First, the measurements

We took 23 popular online recipes and counted everything before the ingredients list. The results:

The full study has the method.

Two of those deserve a second look. 77% of pages add a "Jump to Recipe" button, which means three quarters of publishers know their readers want to skip what they wrote, and built a bypass rather than shortening it. And a median of around 180 ad and tracker references per page tells you what the length is in service of.

None of the reasons below are about helping you cook faster. That is not a criticism of food writers, it is a description of the incentives they work inside.

Reason 1: Search rewarded length for a decade

Through most of the 2010s, longer, more detailed pages tended to rank higher. A page that is only a list of ingredients and six steps looks thin to a search engine, even though it is precisely what a reader wants at 6pm.

So writers added context, background, tips, variations and stories, and the pages that did it climbed. Everyone else copied what worked. The intro grew because growing it was rewarded.

This has shifted somewhat. Search engines have spent recent years pushing toward pages that answer a query quickly. But a decade of incentives leaves a decade of pages behind it, and rewriting hundreds of old posts is a large job with uncertain payoff, so most of that content simply stays.

Reason 2: Every scroll is another ad impression

Display advertising is generally sold per thousand impressions. More scrolling means more ad slots entering the viewport, which means more revenue from the same visitor.

That is why the recipe sits near the bottom, why step photos are stacked one per scroll, and why the median page in our sample carried around 180 ad and tracker references and weighed about half a megabyte.

It also explains something people find puzzling: why an ad blocker does not really fix it. Blocking ads removes the ads, not the 1,300 words. That text is the site's own content, and it is what the ads were arranged around.

Reason 3: A bare recipe is hard to own

This is the part most people have not heard. A list of ingredients and a set of basic instructions is generally treated as facts and procedure, which is a weak position from a copyright perspective. The creative writing wrapped around it, the story, the notes, the photography, is what a publisher can more readily claim as their own.

So the long introduction is doing double duty: keeping you scrolling past ads, and giving the page something distinctive to own. This is general background rather than legal advice, but it is a real part of why the format settled where it did.

Some of it is genuinely good

Worth saying plainly: plenty of food writers love the storytelling, and plenty of readers enjoy it. Notes about why a technique works, what to do when the sauce splits, or which brand of chocolate matters are frequently the most useful part of the page.

The problem is not that the writing exists. It is that it is compulsory. You cannot choose to read it later when you are standing in a kitchen with one hand covered in flour, trying to remember whether it was one egg or two.

How to skip straight to the recipe

Ranked roughly by effort:

• The Jump to Recipe button. Present on 77% of the pages we measured. Instant, though it leaves the ads and layout in place, and sometimes drops you past the first ingredient.
• Ctrl+F for "ingredients" (Cmd+F on Mac). Works everywhere, no install.
• Print view. Many recipe sites have one and it is usually the cleanest thing they publish. You do not have to actually print. See printing a recipe without the ads.
• Reader mode. Built into most browsers, though it sometimes mangles the ingredient list, which is the one part you need intact.
• A recipe extractor. Pulls the title, ingredients, steps and times into a clean view. Gratly does this in one click and is free. See also removing ads and the life story.

Will this get better?

Probably not quickly. The ad model that funds most recipe sites has not changed, and it is the primary reason for the length. Recipe writing that is short and direct tends to live where it does not need ad revenue: cookbooks, newsletters, and creators funded another way.

The realistic answer is not waiting for recipe sites to change. It is having a way to get the recipe out of them.

FAQ

How long is a typical recipe blog post? In our sample of 23 popular recipes, the median was about 1,321 words before the ingredients and about 2,856 words on the page in total. The longest intro was nearly 3,000 words on its own.

Do longer recipe posts actually rank better? They did for most of the 2010s, which is why the format spread. Search has moved toward answering quickly, but a decade of pages written for the old incentives is still out there.

Why is the recipe at the bottom of the page? Because revenue is tied to scroll depth. The further you travel, the more ad impressions the visit produces.

Does an ad blocker fix it? Only partly. It removes the ads but not the introduction, since that text is the site's own content rather than an ad.

Is it rude to skip the story? No. Read it when you want to, skip it when you want dinner. A recipe extractor gives you the clean version alongside the original, so you can do either.

Is the story there for copyright reasons? Partly. A bare ingredient list and set of steps is generally treated as facts and procedure, so the surrounding writing is what gives a page something distinctive to own.

Get just the recipe

Add Gratly to Chrome for free and stop scrolling past the life story. Related: the full length study, how to remove ads from recipe websites, and the complete guide to saving and cooking recipes online.