Make sure your real content dominates the page over chrome and navigation
On content pages, the main content area should hold at least half the page's text.
What this signal tests
On content pages - blog posts, articles, documentation, product pages - we measure the ratio of text inside main or article elements to the total text in the body. We expect that ratio to be at least 0.50, meaning your primary content holds more text than nav menus, footers, sidebars, CTAs, and other chrome combined. Home pages and index pages are exempt.
Why it matters for your visibility in AI
When AI extractors process your page, they use heuristics to find the dominant content region. When boilerplate (mega-menus, repeated footers, marketing strips) outweighs the actual article, those heuristics misidentify your topic - "this page is about subscribing to our newsletter" rather than "this page is about onboarding a new customer". Retrieval-augmented generation then embeds repeated boilerplate alongside content, so future queries surface the same chrome over and over. The concrete consequence is dilution: every additional unit of chrome competes against your real content for the model's attention. A 400-word article wrapped in 1,200 words of navigation and footer becomes, statistically, a page mostly about navigation. Trimming the chrome - or wrapping the content properly in main - restores the page's real topic.
Pass criteria at a glance
| Criterion | Passes when |
|---|---|
| ratio >= 0.50 on content pages (home/index exempt). |
How we test it
We render the page, extract the text content of the main or article element, and compare that text length against the total text content of the body (excluding script and style tags). The resulting ratio is computed. Pages classified as content (article, blog post, product, doc) must score 0.50 or higher; index, list, and home pages are skipped because they legitimately consist of navigation and summaries.
Show technical detection method
Compute ratio main-text-length / total-text-length (excluding script/style).
If your site fails: how to fix it
- Wrap your primary content in a main element if it is not already; this alone can shift the ratio dramatically because the main element gives the measurement a clear target.
- Collapse mega-menu navigation into a smaller default state with an expand-on-demand pattern, reducing the rendered text footprint of the nav on every page.
- Move repetitive marketing strips, related-posts widgets, and CTAs outside the main element so they do not count as part of the primary content area.
- Audit your footer - long lists of links, repeated contact info, and full sitemaps inflate boilerplate. Move sitemap links to a dedicated /sitemap page rather than emitting them on every page.
- For short articles where chrome inevitably dominates, expand the article itself rather than trimming the site - thin content is its own AI readiness problem, separate from chrome ratio.
Quick facts
| Maturity | EMERGING |
|---|---|
| Weight | medium |
| Category | Content Clarity |
Primary sources
Related signals
Frequently asked questions
Does this mean I should remove my navigation?
No. Navigation belongs on every page and serves users. The signal targets the imbalance where chrome dwarfs content, usually because the main content area is thin or improperly marked up. Keep your nav; make sure your real content is wrapped semantically and substantial enough to dominate.
Why are home pages exempt?
Home pages legitimately consist of summaries, navigation, and feature blocks rather than a single primary content unit. Applying the same ratio test would penalize them unfairly. Content pages - the ones AI assistants are most likely to cite - are where the ratio matters most.
How does this differ from classic SEO content-to-code ratio?
Classic SEO sometimes measures HTML versus text. We measure text-in-main versus text-in-body. AI ingestion does not care about the HTML byte count; it cares about which words count as content and which count as chrome, which is a structural rather than a volumetric question.
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