Recipe sites
Why recipe websites make you scroll through someone's life story
You wanted banana bread and got a trip to Tuscany, a dog and fourteen ads. Here's who pays for the free recipe, and how to be a fast reader and a good guest.
You have three brown bananas and a vague memory that banana bread needs baking soda, not powder. You search, tap the first result, and learn that the author first tasted banana bread on a rainy afternoon at her grandmother's house in 1994, that her kids call it "nana bread," and that her kitchen gets wonderful light in the mornings.
Twelve thumb-flicks later you hit the ingredients. Somewhere in between you scrolled past an ad for a mattress, a video about a casserole you will never make, and a pop-up asking whether you'd like notifications. You would not.
Everyone who cooks from the internet has done this scroll. Most of us have also muttered something unkind at it. The thing is, there are real reasons the life story is there, and almost none of them are vanity.
Admit it, you've scrolled
The complaint is old enough to be a genre. Type "why do recipe websites" into a search bar and the suggestions finish the sentence for you: have stories, always crash, constantly refresh. "Why are recipe websites so long" is right behind them.
It's worth separating two annoyances that usually arrive together. One is the length: the essay, the tips, the "why this recipe works" section. The other is the clutter: ads, autoplay videos and pop-ups wedged between the paragraphs. They're related, because the length is partly what makes room for the clutter. But they come from different places, and once you see the machinery the whole page starts to make more sense.
Reason one: ads pay by the screen
Most recipe sites cost nothing to read, and somebody still has to pay for the recipe testing, the groceries, the photography and the web hosting. On most food blogs, that somebody is an advertiser.
Display ads are usually sold by the impression: the site earns a small amount every time an ad is actually shown to a reader. A short page has room for one or two ads. A long page has room for many, spaced down the screen so that each one gets seen as you scroll. More scrolling means more ads seen, and more ads seen is the difference between a hobby and a job.
Food bloggers have been unusually open about this. In a 2020 guest post on Dianne Jacob's blog, the bloggers Vicky Cohen and Ruth Fox explained that they gave up decent-paying jobs to develop and photograph recipes "so our readers can have them for free." Their point was simple: the free recipe has a business model, and you're scrolling through it.
That's also why the page can feel so heavy on a phone. Every ad slot is a little program that loads on its own schedule, which is a big part of why recipe websites crash on your phone and jump around while you read.
Reason two: search engines used to reward length
The second reason is the search box itself. For years, a longer page tended to do better in search results. Fortune and Bloomberg put it plainly in a November 2025 report: the long essays on food blogs are "a phenomenon that also came about because of Google: longer content historically allowed higher ranking in search results and more space for ads."
So bloggers learned to answer every question a reader might have on the same page. Can you freeze it? What if you only have whole wheat flour? Why did mine sink? Some of that is genuinely useful. Some of it is a page stretching to look thorough.
To be fair to Google, its own guidance for site owners now says outright that it has no preferred word count. Its page on helpful content asks writers whether they are writing to a particular length because they heard Google likes it, and answers its own question: "No, we don't." But habits built over a decade don't vanish because a help page says so, and plenty of recipes were written in the long era and are still ranking today.
Reason three: the list isn't protectable, but the writing is
Here's the reason almost nobody knows. In the United States, the recipe itself barely belongs to anyone.
The US Copyright Office spells it out in Circular 33, its guide to works not protected by copyright: "A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable." What can be protected is the creative part around it: a written description or explanation, plus the photographs. The circular says a registration for a recipe won't cover "the list of ingredients" or "the underlying process for making the dish."
Think about what that means for someone who spent a week testing a cake. Anyone can lift the ingredient list and method word for word, with no credit. The headnote, the tips, the story and the photos are the parts that are actually theirs. So the writing isn't only padding. It's the part of the page a creator can own. (That's a general explanation of how US copyright treats recipes, not legal advice.)
Reason four: the stories are often the good part
Once you know the economics, it's easy to treat every paragraph above the recipe as a toll. That would be a shame, because a lot of it is the best cooking advice on the page.
The note that says "don't use a glass pan, the edges burn" came from someone burning the edges. The line about the dough looking too wet at first and then coming together saves you from adding flour you didn't need. The story about a grandmother's version tells you what the dish is supposed to taste like, which no ingredient list can do.
Cooks have always passed recipes along with commentary. The splattered cookbook in your parents' kitchen has notes in the margins for the same reason. When people tried to strip that away, it went badly: in 2021 a site called Recipeasly launched promising "your favourite recipes except without the ads or life stories," and it was taken down within hours after food bloggers objected, Today reported. Its founder apologized with: "We missed the mark big time." The bloggers' argument was that the stories, the ads and the recipes are all part of the same work, and you can't keep one and throw away the people who made it.
Now AI answers are draining the traffic
The bargain behind the long recipe page was always this: you visit, you see some ads, the creator gets paid. That bargain is under real strain.
Search results increasingly answer the question before you ever click. In the same Fortune and Bloomberg report, creators described what that has done to them. Carrie Forrest of Clean Eating Kitchen told reporters that 80% of her traffic and her revenue had disappeared in two years. Eb Gargano of Easy Peasy Foodie said traffic to her turkey recipe was down 40% year over year. Adam Gallagher of Inspired Taste called the AI summaries "Frankenstein AI recipes," because they stitch his ingredients to someone else's instructions. Those are the creators' own figures, reported by journalists, not an industry-wide measurement. But they line up with what a lot of bloggers have been saying publicly.
Google says people still want to read original recipes. In March 2026, after the backlash, it changed how recipes appear in its AI Mode, adding more prominent links back to the sites they come from, as Search Engine Journal reported. Whether that's enough is an open question. Meanwhile, a recipe stitched together from three sources has never been cooked by anyone, which is its own problem, and how to spot an AI recipe is a skill worth having now.
The awkward truth is that the life story you resent is part of what kept that recipe online and free. If the clicks dry up, the recipes don't get more convenient. They get fewer.
How to be a fast reader and a good guest
None of this means you have to read about the Tuscan sunset every time. You can get to dinner quickly and still be a decent guest on someone's site.
- Use the Jump to Recipe button. Most food blogs have one near the top, and the creator put it there for you. Nobody is offended when you press it.
- Use the recipe card's Print button. It usually opens a clean version with just the ingredients and steps. You don't have to print anything; it's a tidy page to read from.
- Keep your own copy of recipes you'll make again. Paste the ingredients and steps somewhere you control, with the link to where it came from. Next time, you skip the page entirely and the creator still got your first visit.
- Write the creator's name on it. Credit travels. "Banana bread, from the blog with the dog" is a recipe you can find again and tell a friend about.
- Go back when you make it again. Leave a comment that says it worked. Comments with real details ("used 2 bananas, baked 5 minutes less") help the next cook and tell the creator a real person was there.
- Buy the cookbook. If someone's recipes have fed your family for years, their book is the most direct thank-you there is.
Tonight, pick the one online recipe you've cooked more than three times. Open it, press Jump to Recipe, copy it into your own notes with the creator's name and the link at the top, and leave them a one-line comment saying you've made it for years. It takes five minutes, and you'll never scroll past that dog again.