Word count on a page: Crawl Audit check 186

Short answer: very short pages often don't say enough for a visitor, a search engine or an AI assistant to know what you offer. Check 186 counts the words in your main content and fails at 300 or fewer. That number is Crawl Audit's rule of thumb, not Google's: Google says it has no preferred word count.

What Crawl Audit checks

• It counts words in <main> (or <article>, or the body minus header, menus and footer).
• Pass: more than 300 words.
• Fail: 300 or fewer. The report shows the count.

Check 187 is the stricter cousin: it fails under 150 words.

What Google says

• "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.)"
• "The length of the content alone doesn't matter for ranking purposes".
• What it does ask: "Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?"

How to use this check

• Treat a fail as a question: does this page answer what a visitor came for? A service page with a heading, one sentence and a button usually doesn't.
• Add what people actually ask: what's included, who it's for, price or how it's priced, how long it takes, what happens next.
• Don't pad. A contact page or a short tool page can be complete in under 300 words, and that's fine.

On devmarde.com

Our homepage's main content was 2,942 words on 6 October. It passes.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (updated 5 October 2026) and SEO Starter Guide, checked 6 October 2026.