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The Recipe Mafia Hurts the Consumer

Did you know Google essentially mandates that recipe sites follow a specific format or else they will not feature your recipe in their search engine?

I went down a rabbit hole of food recipe madness after posting my first recipe the other day, and I thought it would be interesting to share the craziness that is recipe SEO.

Mealie Parsing

In my previous blog post, I ended the post talking about how I typically parsed recipes using the Mealie recipe management software. It has a really handy tool that imports a URL and adds the recipe to the database. I noted that I would try to parse my post and update that post with the results.

When I attempted to import the recipe, I got this error:

Only websites containing ld+json can be imported by Mealie

The links led me down another rabbit hole about the recipe schema and how Google prefers recipes in that JSON format for their search results.

The Recipe Format

Google prefers the recipes to be in JSON-LD, a special JSON format designed for encoding linked data. Embedded in your HTML with a script tag, recipe sites include a machine-readable version of the recipe.

Here's my "Hogchiladas" recipe in this JSON-LD format:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Recipe",
  "name": "Hogchiladas",
  "description": "A delicious enchilada-style dish made with pork carnitas, cheese, and a creamy green chile sauce.",
  "image": "",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Grant McLravy"
  },
  "datePublished": "2025-03-23",
  "recipeCategory": ["Dinner"],
  "recipeYield": "6 servings",
  "totalTime": "PT45M",
  "prepTime": "PT20M",
  "cookTime": "PT25M",
  "recipeIngredient": [
    "1 lb Aldi microwavable pork carnitas",
    "5 oz Aldi teriyaki sauce",
    "2 cups Monterrey Jack / Chihuahua cheese",
    "6 taco-sized tortillas",
    "5 oz canned Mexican street corn",
    "1 bunch fresh cilantro",
    "5 oz canned green chiles",
    "1 whole large red onion, chopped",
    "14 oz chicken broth",
    "2 tbsp flour",
    "1 cup sour cream",
    "French fried onions (for garnish)",
    "Real bacon bits",
    "4 tbsp unsalted butter"
  ],
  "recipeInstructions": [
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "Preheat oven to 350 degrees."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "Sautee chopped onions in butter."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "To make sauce, combine 1 cup of sour cream, chiles, and chicken broth. Heat, stir, then add flour to thicken. Do not let boil."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "Microwave Aldi pork; add 1/3 of the bottle of teriyaki sauce."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "Add in 1/3 a can of street corn, onion, cilantro to meat and mix thoroughly."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "Scoop into tortillas; add cheese to inside; roll into greased oven pan."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "Top with sauce and additional cheese."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "Bake 25 minutes or until cheese is toasted."
    },
    {
      "@type": "HowToStep",
      "text": "Top with cilantro, French-fried onions, and bacon bits."
    }
  ],
  "nutrition": {
    "@type": "NutritionInformation"
  }
}

It cracks me up to no end that hidden in the recipe page is the readable recipe for the computer, while the human has to slog through stories about the impact of the recipe or the why behind cooking it, all while loading advertisements.

webcomic decrying the length of introductions on recipe sites

A food blogger named Kyleigh Sage wrote an article titled Why Food Bloggers Don't Just Post the Recipe where she discusses the reality behind running an independent food blog. She states the most important reason that food blogs have the long articles discussing the recipe before just including it is because recipe posts are written with Google SEO recommendations in mind.

SEO Ruins the Internet

I strongly believe that SEO is actively ruining the internet. Search Engine Optimization is the act of designing your web presence in a way that enables your website to be higher in the search engine ranking. The Verge's article about SEO by Amanda Chicago Lewis is one of my favorite articles of all time - the way these SEO consultants see themselves as the hackers decoding the algorithms that control the world cracks me up. In reality, SEO results in the slop that makes the modern web so annoying to navigate.

SEO is the reason every software as a service company has a page comparing their software to the name brand and ultimately recommending you to use their own software. SEO is the reason that there are 500 word articles for "What Channel is the Super Bowl On" from random sites when the answer is one word - "FOX". SEO explains the dozens of articles about "When Severance Season 3 Releases" that all have no new information.

Google is the primary referrer for all traffic on the web. What Google says goes. If Google says that recipe sites need to include a secret code, bloggers would be foolish if they ignored their primary source of eyeballs.

Google Enables Recipe Scraping

I clicked around on Kyleigh's food blog to find a recipe for an example. I found this lovely Baked Mac & Cheese recipe.

Baked Mac & Cheese

Sure enough, opening the Inspect Element screen, in the <head> div, there was a JSON-LD block that contained the full recipe in this special formatting.

JSON-LD data for the mac and cheese recipe

I hopped over to my favorite recipe manager Mealie, and was able to successfully import it immediately from just the URL.

Recipe imported into mealie

Because Google needs a machine-readable way to display recipe cards, and Google controls web traffic to recipe sites, I don't have to read all the fluff in a recipe and immediately import it into my recipe management site without loading the ads.

I'm one who waxes philosophical on the business model of the internet and the future of how we gather information. It's crazy to me that SEO has made recipe sites less readable and human friendly, while making these more parse-able for machines.

Writers should have the option of being paid for their work. Google should be able to display recipes in a way consumers want to read them. As with most tug-of-war games with a megacorp, the smaller party doesn't typically win. Food writers need to format their recipes in a specific way, include their keywords, and if they're lucky they will be rewarded with web traffic.

Ultimately, I stumbled into the wacky world of recipe SEO after failing to import a recipe from my website into Mealie. I finally added the needed script file to my previous Hogchildas blog post and was able to scrape it using mealie successfully.

Mealie hogchiladas