I had a terrible marvelous idea today! As everyone knows, recipe blogs are the absolute worst. You need to scroll through endless faff stories before you can get to the actual recipe, which is all anyone ever wants.

Why is this?

Well, there are several reasons. The one sited most often is that these stories are necessary for search engine optimization. Having more text means more content to match on. That gets the prominence higher in the search results and thus, more clicks. Sounds good, but it’s BS.

Wordcount isn’t a ranking factor!

So what is it then?

Food blogs are run primarily on ad revenue. These lengthy stories allow for two important things to happen:

1. Longer time-on-page, a metric which looks impressive to ad networks placing ads on your site.
2. More ads on the page! Scroll further down, have another ad. More money. Woo.

Is that really all?

Well, no. There’s also some actual desire to paint a picture with words. Many food bloggers see their content as an experience and those stories help to create that experience. Their brand is tied to how they tell a story, and a good rapport and experience can build an organic following, just like any other blog.

Okay, so THAT is really it?

Hah, no… There’s one last point that many people overlook. You can’t copyright a recipe.

All that blubbering before the recipe actually makes the entry into a complete creative work. That creative work contains the recipe, but it is a whole unit and protected. Pretty fancy, huh?

Wait, so what was the terrible idea?

Ahem, the MARVELOUS idea is to leverage everyone’s favorite infatuation du jour, ChatGPT, to create the world’s worst recipe blog!

We just marry up a brief block of text to set the tone for the recipe story, then hand that off to ChatGPT to keep that story going, and finally plug in the infinite scroll antipattern so that it never, ever ends!

The best part is, you don’t even actually need a recipe! The user will just scroll forever trying to find it.

For maximum awfulness, marry this up with as many ads as you can. That’ll really maximize the experience.