A recipe page has to work for the cook. Google says it has no preferred word count.
I went back to Google’s own recipe documentation, its rater handbook, and the few studies that put real recipes in front of cooks. Rules shown in full say what backs them. Where that is a small study, I say how small.
Sources checkedOctober 2026
Last revised12 October 2026
Next reviewJanuary 2027
ByChuck Aikens
one-person consultancy for consumer product brands
15 years
Findable. Cookable. Marked up to match.
The rules
All 9 rules. Three shown in full.
1RULE 1 OF 9 · PLATFORM SAYS | EXPERT PRACTICE
The intro and the jump link
The recipe sits near the top of the page. Add a “jump to recipe” link that’s easy to spot. Keep the intro under 200 words, and go longer only for substance a cook uses: technique, substitutions, storage. Never filler.
What backs it
Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines say that on recipe pages “the recipe itself and important supporting content directly related to the recipe should be prominently displayed near the top of the webpage.”Google, Search Quality Rater Guidelines, September 2025
One Low example is a recipe page where “significant scrolling is required to find the actual Butterbeer recipe. The ‘jump to recipe’ link itself is difficult to find.” Same document, Low: Recipe 3
The 200 words are mine.
3 steps to apply this are in the full Guideline.
2IngredientsIn the full Guideline
3RULE 3 OF 9 · EXPERT PRACTICE | MEASURED
Directions
Every step is something a cook can do, and a first-timer could follow it. Whatever a step depends on is in that step or an earlier one. One main action per step. Include temperatures, times and a visual or sensory cue for done. Notes and suitable-ingredient tips sit under a short label at the end of the step they belong to.
What backs it
The rater handbook rates an apple pie recipe Low because it “gives no indication of how to make a crust” and so “It would be very difficult to actually make an apple pie using this recipe.”Google, Search Quality Rater Guidelines, Low: apple pie recipe
In an exploratory study, eight Dutch-speaking young adults in the Netherlands, aged 18 to 22, in four teams of two, baked chocolate chip cookies from an English-language blog recipe. The paper reports that “none of the teams read through their instructions before they started the baking process even while they were advised to do so,” and that “All teams made the mistake of not saving chocolate chips to top off the cookies after baking.” One small group, one dish: a reason to write for a cook who doesn’t read ahead, not a rate.van der Sluis and Mellema, 2025, A recipe for success: The design, use, and effectiveness of multimodal online baking instructions, SAGE
In a preprint, 300 amateur cooks recruited on Lancers, a Japanese crowdsourcing platform, rated rearranged versions of 86 professional Japanese recipes. Suitable ingredients or notes “arranged with a subheading at the end of each cooking step significantly increased recipes’ usefulness.” The coefficients are small (0.01 and 0.03 per sentence) and the measure is a usefulness rating, not a cooking result.Kagawa et al., May 2023, An experimental framework for designing document structure, arXiv, one version
3 steps to apply this are in the full Guideline.
4RULE 4 OF 9 · REQUIRED
Schema
Output Recipe markup. Google requires only name and image. Fill in the recommended fields where they’re true, and make every field match what’s visible on the page.
What backs it
Google’s recipe documentation, last updated 8 September 2026: “You must include the required properties for your content to be eligible for display as a rich result in Google Search.”Google Search Central, Recipe structured data
Its general guidelines add: “Don’t mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page.”Google Search Central, General structured data guidelines
If a page gets a structured data manual action, Google says “the structured data on the page will be ignored (although the page can still appear in Google Search results).” Its general guidelines add that this “doesn’t affect how the page ranks in Google web search.”Recipe structured data, troubleshooting; General structured data guidelines
4 steps to apply this are in the full Guideline.
5Creator credit and disclosureIn the full Guideline
6Product linksIn the full Guideline
7Collections vs single recipesIn the full Guideline
8Pruning and mergingIn the full Guideline
9Where drink recipes differIn the full Guideline
The short version
Write for the cook. Mark it up to match.
A recipe a cook can find and follow comes first. The markup then has to match the page, or the rich result is at risk. What each rule asks, and what I’ll claim it does, is set out rule by rule.
Measured: a published test, population and date stated.
Platform says: stated, no method shown.
Expert practice: my judgment, my reason.
Unproven: repeated, nothing I could check.
Open: sources conflict, or never tested.
The grade is the honest part. The rule is the point.
What I’d tell you in a meeting.
Clients get the full Guideline
How to do it: 26 steps across the nine rules
The builder instructions for an AI recipe builder
Where to start with a recipe library already live
What clients get
Three rules and one myth of nine. Clients read the whole Recipes Guideline on app.tymoo.ai, updated quarterly. When Google’s rules or the research move, I update the rules and say when.