Data study · Niche schema types AI answers can read
28.0% of Recipe Pages Leave Cook Time Out of Their Markup, and 46.6% Skip Nutrition
Of 1,377 crawled top-1M pages with Recipe markup in October 2026, 385 (28.0%) have no cookTime and 641 (46.6%) have no nutrition. 45.4% carry no rating.
Analysis of 1,377 pages with Recipe markup on 1,341 top-1M sites · HTTP Archive, October 2026, with trend back to 2023
Key findings
- 1
28.0% of recipe pages (385 of 1,377) do not include cookTime in their Recipe markup.
- 2
15.1% include neither cookTime nor totalTime, so their markup gives no time at all.
- 3
46.6% have no nutrition information and 45.4% have no aggregateRating.
- 4
Ingredients and instructions are near complete at 92.1% and 90.4%; suitableForDiet appears on just 8.1%.
- 5
Rating coverage has slipped since 2023, from 61.9% of recipe pages (1,317 of 2,127) to 54.6% (752 of 1,377).
- 6
Pages on top-10,000 sites are no more complete: 61.9% include cookTime and 47.6% include nutrition (N=21).
Summary
Someone asks an AI assistant for a weeknight chicken dinner that takes under 30 minutes and is under 500 calories. The assistant needs cook time and nutrition to answer. A food blog's recipe might be perfect, but if its markup leaves out those two fields, the assistant has to guess or move on.
Recipe markup is one of the most detailed schema types. It covers ingredients, steps, times, servings, nutrition and ratings. Search engines use it for recipe results, and AI engines can use it to filter recipes by time, diet and calories.
We checked 1,377 recipe pages in the October 2026 crawl. 28.0% leave cook time out of their markup and 46.6% leave out nutrition.
What we measured
We used four October crawls from HTTP Archive (2023 to 2026), mobile client, top-1M sites. HTTP Archive crawls each site's homepage plus one inner page. We parsed the rendered JSON-LD on each page, flattened nested objects and @graph arrays, and kept pages with a Recipe node.
For each page we combined the properties of all its Recipe nodes and recorded which ones are present. Gaps are reported across all recipe sites; no recipe plugin or theme is named.
Time, nutrition and ratings are the weak spots
The core of a recipe is well covered. The fields people filter on are not.
% of recipe pages (N=1,377)
| Property | Pages | Share % |
|---|---|---|
| image | 1,359 | 98.7 |
| description | 1,308 | 95 |
| recipeIngredient | 1,268 | 92.1 |
| recipeInstructions | 1,245 | 90.4 |
| recipeYield | 1,192 | 86.6 |
| recipeCategory | 1,134 | 82.4 |
| prepTime | 1,066 | 77.4 |
| keywords | 1,045 | 75.9 |
| totalTime | 1,015 | 73.7 |
| cookTime | 992 | 72 |
| recipeCuisine | 959 | 69.6 |
| aggregateRating | 752 | 54.6 |
| nutrition | 736 | 53.4 |
| suitableForDiet | 112 | 8.1 |
Source: aisearchoptimization.net analysis of 1,377 pages with Recipe markup on 1,341 top-1M sites · HTTP Archive, October 2026, with trend back to 2023
Some recipes have no cooking step, such as salads or smoothies, which may explain part of the cookTime gap. The 15.1% with neither cookTime nor totalTime have no time data at all.
Completeness has not improved
Fewer recipe pages were crawled in 2026 than in 2023, and the ones that remain are no more complete.
| Crawl | Recipe pages | Sites | cookTime % | nutrition % | aggregateRating % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2023 | 2,127 | 2,061 | 69.8 | 55.6 | 61.9 |
| Oct 2024 | 1,764 | 1,720 | 72.6 | 56.6 | 57.5 |
| Oct 2025 | 1,831 | 1,786 | 74.3 | 56.4 | 53.5 |
| Oct 2026 | 1,377 | 1,341 | 72 | 53.4 | 54.6 |
Source: aisearchoptimization.net analysis of 1,377 pages with Recipe markup on 1,341 top-1M sites · HTTP Archive, October 2026, with trend back to 2023
The drop in crawled recipe pages may partly reflect which inner page HTTP Archive happened to sample for each site.
Big recipe sites leave the same gaps
By site rank, 2026. The top tier has only 21 pages, so read it as a direction.
| Rank bucket | Recipe pages | cookTime % | nutrition % | aggregateRating % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 10,000 | 21 | 61.9 | 47.6 | 52.4 |
| 10,001 to 100,000 | 126 | 69 | 54 | 69 |
| 100,001 to 1M | 1,230 | 72.5 | 53.5 | 53.2 |
Source: aisearchoptimization.net analysis of 1,377 pages with Recipe markup on 1,341 top-1M sites · HTTP Archive, October 2026, with trend back to 2023
Ratings are most common in the 10,001 to 100,000 tier at 69.0%.
What this means
If you publish recipes, fill in prepTime, cookTime and totalTime in ISO 8601 format (PT20M for 20 minutes), add nutrition with at least calories per serving, set recipeYield, and add suitableForDiet where it applies. Only add aggregateRating if you collect real ratings on the page. A GEO agency will tell you the same thing, because fake ratings can get your markup ignored.
AI assistants filter recipes by time, calories and diet. The fields you leave blank are the filters you fail. Ask for a free AI visibility audit to see whether assistants recommend your recipes today, before paying for generative engine optimization services on a food site.
Limits
HTTP Archive crawls one homepage and one inner page per site, so recipe counts reflect the sample, not all recipe pages.
Some recipes legitimately have no cooking time.
We check for the presence of a property, not whether its value is valid.
We count JSON-LD only.
Embed this research
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<iframe src="https://aisearchoptimization.net/embed/data-studies/recipe-markup-missing-cook-time-nutrition" title="28% of Recipe Pages Leave Cook Time Out of Their Markup" width="100%" height="720" style="border:0" loading="lazy"></iframe>
Cite this study
APA
Grenyo, K. (2026). 28% of Recipe Pages Leave Cook Time Out of Their Markup. AI Search Optimization. https://aisearchoptimization.net/resources/data-studies/recipe-markup-missing-cook-time-nutrition
Plain link
28% of Recipe Pages Leave Cook Time Out of Their Markup - AI Search Optimization - https://aisearchoptimization.net/resources/data-studies/recipe-markup-missing-cook-time-nutrition
Frequently asked questions
How many recipe pages are missing cook time in their schema?
28.0% of crawled top-1M recipe pages in October 2026 (385 of 1,377) had no cookTime. 15.1% had neither cookTime nor totalTime.
Do recipe pages include nutrition markup?
About half. 53.4% include nutrition and 8.1% include suitableForDiet.
Is recipe markup getting more complete?
No. Ratings fell from 61.9% of recipe pages in 2023 to 54.6% in 2026, and cookTime stayed around 70%.
What recipe fields matter most for AI answers?
Times, servings, nutrition and diet, because those are the filters people use when they ask for a recipe. Ingredients and instructions are already present on more than 90% of pages.
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