How Many Words Before the Recipe?

People complain that recipe blogs make you scroll past a long introduction to get to the recipe. I counted how long the introduction is and checked whether it has grown. The data is 2,502 recipe pages from 12 food blogs, taken from copies archived between 2015 and 2026. On each page I counted the words between the recipe’s headline and its first ingredient.

Six of the blogs can be measured in both 2015 and 2026. Across those six, the median was 263 words in 2015 and 630 in 2026.

Six blogs, 2015 and 2026

The typical recipe page on each blog, from the headline down to the ingredients

Ten wordsOne imageThe ingredients start

Each page is drawn from the blog's median for that year: the number under it is the median count of words, and the blocks are the median count of images. Images are not drawn to scale. 60 recipe pages per blog per year, from Common Crawl's archives of July 2015 and September 2026.

Five of the six grew by at least 180 words. Damn Delicious barely changed. Across the six, the number of images above the ingredients went from a median of five to eight.

The longest page

These are medians, and individual pages vary a lot. Of the 360 pages from 2026, a quarter had fewer than 370 words before the ingredients and a quarter had more than 820. Forty-three had more than 1,000.

The longest was a French macaron recipe on Sally’s Baking Addiction, with 3,561 words and 23 images above the ingredients. It is drawn below at the same scale as the chart above.

The median page of 2015, the median page of 2026 and the longest page measured

Jump to the rest of the article

The six blogs measured in both years. Ten words to a line, as above.

Most of the growth came before 2019

Nine blogs can be measured in 2015, 2019 and 2022. Their median rose from 308 words in 2015 to 475 in 2019, and then to 503 in 2022. All nine were longer in 2022 than in 2015.

The median page across nine blogs

Text only, without the images. About 60 recipe pages per blog per year.

The reason usually given for long introductions is that Google ranks longer pages higher. On 18 August 2022 Google published a list of questions for people who write for the web. One of them was: “Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).” On these nine blogs, most of the growth had already happened by then.

What the count includes

The count covers everything between the headline and the ingredients. As well as the introduction, that takes in the byline, the star rating, the notice about affiliate links, the prep and cook times and the print button. On the blog pages I read, those came to roughly 40 to 60 words a page.

Links that skip the introduction

Many blogs now put a link near the top of the page that jumps to the recipe. I counted how many pages had one.

Recipe pages with a link labelled "jump to recipe" or "skip to recipe"

All blog pages measured in each year. The blogs in the archive differ from year to year: 10 in each of 2015 and 2019, 11 in 2022, and 6 in each of 2024 and 2026.

The link tends to arrive on a whole blog at once. Six blogs had it on every page I sampled from 2019: Pinch of Yum, Sally’s Baking Addiction, Budget Bytes, Cookie and Kate, Half Baked Harvest and Once Upon a Chef. Minimalist Baker and Gimme Some Oven had it on none of their 2019 pages and all of their 2022 pages.

The big recipe sites

I measured eleven large recipe sites the same way, 2,100 pages in all. The chart puts ten of them beside the blogs for 2022, the last year most of them are in the archive.

Median words between the headline and the first ingredient, 2022

Food blogsLarge recipe sites

About 60 recipe pages per site, from Common Crawl's archive of August 2022.

Nine of the large sites sit below every blog. The exception is Simply Recipes, which began as one person’s blog and is now owned by a publisher. Its median went from 174 words in 2015 to 461 in 2022.

Most of the others did not grow. Nine large sites can be compared between 2015 and 2022, and their combined median was 97 words in 2015 and 103 in 2022. BBC Good Food, Taste of Home, Food.com, Serious Eats and Bon Appétit were each a little shorter in 2022 than in 2015.

Serious Eats is the only large site where the jump link is common: 59 of its 60 pages from 2022 had one.

What I didn’t measure

I didn’t test why the blogs’ introductions grew. Besides search ranking, the other explanation usually given is that the ads are placed in the text. This data can’t test either one.

I also can’t say what the large sites look like now. Apart from King Arthur Baking, none of them is in the 2026 archive.

Sources

Common Crawl, a public archive of the web that follows each site's rules about what may be collected. Five of its crawls were used: July 2015, August 2019, August 2022, August 2024 and September 2026.
The 12 blogs: Budget Bytes, Cookie and Kate, Damn Delicious, Gimme Some Oven, Half Baked Harvest, Love and Lemons, Minimalist Baker, Natasha's Kitchen, Once Upon a Chef, Pinch of Yum, RecipeTin Eats and Sally's Baking Addiction. I chose them as large, well-known food blogs. They are not a ranked or random list.
The 11 large sites: Allrecipes, BBC Good Food, Bon Appétit, Delish, Epicurious, Food.com, Food Network, King Arthur Baking, Serious Eats, Simply Recipes and Taste of Home.
Collected 7 and 8 October 2026.

Method

For each site and each crawl, pages were drawn at random from those the archive held until 60 recipe pages had been measured. Print versions, category pages and shop pages were left out.
On each page the count runs from the recipe's title to the first item in its ingredient list, in the order the page is written. Menus, forms and hidden text are not counted. Bylines, ratings, notices and buttons are.
A site and year were kept only if at least 30 pages could be measured. That left 43 samples from the blogs and 35 from the large sites.
I read 66 pages, about three per site, against the script's count. On 64 the count started and stopped in the right place. On the other two it had taken the site's name for the recipe title. I corrected the rule and measured every page again.

Limitations

Only six blogs can be compared between 2015 and 2026. Several blogs have no pages in the later crawls, and others had too few recipes the script could read in 2015.
A page is measured as it stood in the year of the crawl. Sites rewrite old recipes, so this is what a visitor found that year, not what was written that year.
Sixty pages is still a small sample for one site in one year, and the pages drawn differ from year to year. Once Upon a Chef's median was 466 words in 2019, 407 in 2022 and 642 in 2024. The figures for groups of sites are steadier than those for any one.
The jump link is found by its wording. A link that does the same job under another label is missed. RecipeTin Eats is one such blog, so the shares in the second chart are a little low.
Two blogs I tried are left out. Smitten Kitchen writes its ingredients as plain paragraphs, and The Pioneer Woman's pages put a section name where the recipe title should be, so the script could not find where to start or stop on enough of their pages.