Why Are Recipe Websites So Long? The Real Reason You Can't Find the Recipe

Have you ever searched for a simple recipe — say, chocolate chip cookies — and landed on a page that starts with a 2,000-word essay about the author's childhood memories of baking with their grandmother? You're not alone. This is one of the most common complaints about cooking websites today.

The SEO Problem

The reason recipe websites are so long has everything to do with search engine optimization (SEO). Google's algorithm tends to favor longer, more detailed content. A page with 300 words about a recipe will almost always rank lower than a page with 2,000 words. Recipe bloggers learned this years ago, and the result is what you see today: pages stuffed with personal stories, tips, variations, and history — all designed to push the word count higher.

The Ad Revenue Model

There's a second, equally powerful reason: advertising. Most recipe websites make money through display ads. The more you scroll, the more ads you see, and the more money the site earns. A recipe that fits on one screen generates far less revenue than one that requires you to scroll through ten screens of content.

This creates a perverse incentive. The harder it is to find the recipe, the more money the website makes. It's not that bloggers are trying to annoy you — they're responding rationally to the economic incentives of the web.

The Recipe Card Buried at the Bottom

Most recipe bloggers do include a structured "recipe card" at the bottom of the page. This is a standardized format that search engines can read. But by the time you scroll down to it, you've already passed through dozens of ads and paragraphs of filler content.

What You Can Do About It

There are a few strategies for dealing with this:

1. Use the "Jump to Recipe" button. Many recipe sites now include a button at the top that scrolls you directly to the recipe card. Look for it before you start scrolling.

2. Use a recipe extraction tool. Tools like BoilDown let you paste any recipe URL and instantly get just the ingredients and instructions — no stories, no ads, no clutter.

3. Use your browser's "Find" feature. Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on Mac) and search for "ingredients" to jump straight to the relevant section.

4. Print the recipe. Many recipe cards have a print button that produces a clean version of just the recipe.

The internet has made it incredibly easy to find recipes, but the business model of the web has made it unnecessarily hard to actually read them. Tools that strip away the noise and give you just what you need are becoming essential for anyone who cooks regularly.