How Long Should a Blog Post Be? We Measured Google's Top 10 for 400 Searches

You've finished a draft at 1,100 words and a voice in your head says it needs to be 2,500 "for SEO". That number came from somewhere, usually a study from 2016 or a tool that counts words on the pages above you. So we went and measured it ourselves, this month, on real search results.

We took 400 everyday informational searches in the US, pulled Google's top 10 results for each, and measured every page we could read: 1,593 articles, guides and other text pages from 1,218 different websites. This post covers how long those pages are, whether longer pages rank higher, and what the pages that rank actually have in common. All numbers come from our own measurement on 19 October 2026.

Key Findings

• The median top-10 page is 997 words. Half of all ranking pages are shorter than that.
• Length does not predict rank. The average correlation between word count and position within a search was 0.045, which is effectively zero.
• The page in position 1 is usually not the longest. It was the longest measured page in only 23% of searches, close to the 20% that chance alone would give.
• 57% of pages ranking first are under 1,000 words. Only 9% are over 3,000.
• "Ideas" and "tips" posts run longest (median 1,451 and 1,309 words). "What is" answers run shortest (731).
• 28% of all top-10 results are not articles at all. They are YouTube videos, Reddit and Facebook threads, Quora answers and Pinterest pins. A Reddit thread appeared on page one for 50% of searches.
• Half of dated pages were updated in the last 12 months, and 29% hadn't been touched in over two years.
• 48% of ranking pages link to no outside source at all.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

For most informational posts, aim for the length the question needs, which for the pages ranking today usually means somewhere between 600 and 1,600 words. Half of the 1,593 top-10 pages we measured fall inside that range, the median is 997 words, and the page in position 1 has a median of 911. There is no ranking bonus for going longer, and at an average reading speed of about 238 words a minute, a 997-word post takes roughly four minutes to read.

Here is the full spread:

The middle half of pages (the 25th to 75th percentile) sits between 613 and 1,598 words. Only one page in ten is longer than 2,656 words. The mean is 1,391, pulled up by a small number of very long guides, which is why the average you see quoted is higher than what a typical ranking page looks like.

Do Longer Blog Posts Rank Higher?

No. In our data, longer pages did not rank higher than shorter pages on the same search. We compared pages against the other pages competing for the same query, which is the only fair comparison, and the average correlation between word count and ranking position was 0.045. A value of 0 means no relationship, and 1 would mean the longest page always wins.

The median length barely moves by position:

Two more ways of looking at it point the same way. The top-ranking page was longer than the median of its competitors in 51% of searches, a coin flip. And it was the single longest page in 23% of searches. Those searches had about five measurable pages each, so chance alone would land near 20%.

This is why "write 2,000 words" advice keeps failing people. Long pages rank for broad, complicated questions because those questions need more words, not because Google counts them.

How Long Are Blog Posts by Type of Search?

The question decides the length. Searches that ask for a list of options produce the longest pages; searches with a single answer produce the shortest.

The topic matters too. Money questions (salaries, costs, investing, loans) had the longest ranking pages, with a median of 1,472 words. Health pages had a median of 895, and food and drink pages 889, despite those being the niches people assume reward long posts. The health results lean heavily on Healthline, Cleveland Clinic, WebMD and Mayo Clinic, which answer in tight, sectioned pages rather than long essays.

If you write about books, writing or publishing, the practical reading is simple: a "what is a pen name" post can stop at 700 words, and a "book launch ideas" post probably needs 1,500.

What Do Top-Ranking Blog Posts Have in Common?

Structure, short paragraphs and plain language show up far more consistently than length.

Headings. The median page has 4 H2 headings, about one for every 200 words. A quarter of ranking pages have no H2 at all, usually short answer pages. 54% use at least one question as a heading.

Paragraphs and sentences. On the median page, paragraphs average 36.5 words, about two sentences. Only 3% of pages average more than 100 words per paragraph. Sentences on the median page average 20.8 words.

Readability. The median Flesch reading ease score is 50.9, on a scale where 60 to 70 is plain English and 50 to 60 is "fairly difficult". The middle half of pages scored between 38.1 and 61.3, and the top 3 positions (50.1) scored the same as positions 4 to 10 (51.6). Google is not rewarding simpler writing directly, but none of the winners are hard to read.

Lists, tables and images. 68% of pages use at least one bulleted or numbered list. Only 12% use a table. The median page has 1.7 images per 1,000 words, and 36% of ranking pages have no image in the article body at all.

Tables of contents and FAQs. 48% of pages show a table of contents or "jump to" links. 18% end with an FAQ section, at the same rate in the top 3 as further down.

Authors. 62% of pages show an author in their page data. The share is the same in the top 3 (60%) and positions 4 to 10 (63%).

Titles. The median page title is 56 characters, and 37% run past 60, where Google often cuts them off. Only 5% put a year in the title. You can see how your own title and description look when shared with our Open Graph checker.

How Often Are Top-Ranking Blog Posts Updated?

About half the dated pages in Google's top 10 were published or updated in the last 12 months. 67% of pages show a date in their page data; across those 1,072 pages, the median page was last updated 359 days before we measured it.

• 19% were updated in the last 3 months.
• 50% were updated in the last 12 months.
• 29% hadn't changed in more than 2 years.
• 8% were more than 5 years old.

Updating is normal practice among ranking pages. 64% of pages that show both dates had been updated at least a month after they were first published, and among those pages the median was first published 2.9 years ago. Pages in the top 3 were slightly fresher (54% updated within a year, against 49% in positions 4 to 10), a small difference that is worth less than it looks.

The useful takeaway for writers: a three-year-old post that you refresh is a normal top-10 page. You don't need to write a new one.

How Many Top-Ranking Posts Cite Their Sources?

Fewer than you'd expect. 48% of the pages we measured contain no link to any other website inside the article, and the median page has one. The rate barely changes by topic: 52% of health pages and 43% of money pages link to no outside source.

That is good news if you write carefully. Linking to the original study, survey or document behind a claim is something half of your competition skips, and it is exactly what gets a post cited by other writers. Our AI and writing statistics page shows the approach: every figure links to the survey, study or court filing it came from. Our attention span statistics page goes a step further and traces the famous 8-second goldfish claim back to where it started.

How Much of Page One Is Not Blog Posts?

28% of the top-10 results we collected were not articles. YouTube had 274 of them, Reddit 210, Facebook 178, Quora 109 and Pinterest 46. Platforms held 30% of first positions, and a Reddit thread appeared on page one for 50% of the 400 searches.

For a blogger, this changes the competition. On many searches you are not only competing with other posts; you are competing with a forum thread that answers the question in a sentence. Posts that win against threads tend to do what a thread can't: give a clear answer first, then the detail, with sources.

What This Means for Your Next Post

• Write to the question, not to a word count. Check what the question needs: a definition (around 700 words), a comparison (around 950), a list of ideas (around 1,450).
• Answer in the first paragraph under each heading, then add detail. Pages that rank use one H2 roughly every 200 words.
• Keep paragraphs to two or three sentences. Almost no ranking page has long blocks of text.
• Link to your sources. Half of the pages you compete with don't.
• Refresh rather than rewrite. The median ranking page is almost a year since its last update and nearly three years since it was first written.

We take the same measured approach to website templates: our study of 860 scored templates shows what separates the strongest designs from the rest.

Methodology

• Searches. 400 informational searches in English, chosen at random from US searches with 1,000 to 60,000 monthly searches that start with common question phrases ("how to", "what is", "signs of", "ideas for", "difference between" and 10 others). We removed unit conversions, definitions, times, prices and brand or celebrity searches, and limited each topic category so no single subject dominated.
• Results. Google's top 10 organic results for each search, US, desktop, collected on 19 October 2026 through the DataForSEO search results API: 3,119 results in total.
• Pages. We downloaded each page and extracted the main article text with Mozilla Readability, the library behind Firefox's Reader View, then counted words, headings, lists, tables, images and links inside the article body only (navigation, sidebars and footers excluded). Dates and authors come from each page's structured data and article meta tags. Readability is the Flesch reading ease formula on up to 6,000 words of each page.
• What we excluded. 865 results on YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Quora, Pinterest, Instagram, Amazon and LinkedIn, which we counted but did not measure. 500 results (16%) blocked automated visits or failed to load, so sites with strict bot protection are under-represented. Pages under 150 words were left out of the length figures. That left 1,593 pages from 1,218 websites.
• Limits. This is a correlation study of one moment in US English search. It shows what ranking pages look like, not what causes them to rank. Word counts from text extraction can differ slightly from the count in a writer's editor.

How to Cite This Study

You're welcome to use any figure or table from this post in your own writing. Please credit "BestWebsiteTemplate.com, How Long Should a Blog Post Be? (October 2026)" and link to this page so readers can check the method.