-
Shorter Content is Better for Ranking in AI
Posted by on December 26, 2025 at 4:12 pmAleyda Solís had shared an article on LinkedIn from a study that Dan Petrovic (owner of Dejan) did looking at the original content length vs what was getting the most prominence in AI overviews.
"Pages over 2,000 words see diminishing returns—adding more content dilutes your coverage percentage without increasing what gets selected."
This was a conclusion in the study.
It's a great study. I generally agree with the final conclusion (not the one I posted above), but the one at the end of the report:
"…density beats length. Focus on being the most relevant source for a query, not the longest."
That's always been true.
But that doesn't mean there isn't a place and for large pieces of content (pillar content). I feel like this study ignores overall content strategy and hierarchy.
The study puts a lot of emphasis showing that it doesn't matter how long your content is, you're going to get roughly the same amount of coverage in AI overviews.
A lot of people are going to see this and shift their time focusing and content less than 1,500 words. They're going to start calling 4,000 word pieces "useless" and "wasteful" in terms of SEO.
Long pieces of content will also be conflated with "less-impactful" pieces of content.
Those people area wrong and will continue circling down the drain.
Thinking this way assumes Google cares more about some arbitrary "impact" score of a single page vs the topical authority the content of that page might have because of its linking and relevant sources.
Shorter pieces of content are easier to digest and that's what AI overview aim to accomplish. But the authority of the content in its decisions to display that content is and should be represented by the topical authority and linking content.
This is the whole point of pillar content and it doesn't change now that AI is taking the field.
Studies like this are great, but I think they need to be careful about the words they choose.
The third takeaway was titled:
"Diminishing Returns: Pages over 1,500 word don't get more selected."
It should have been:
"Interesting Insight: Pages over 1,500 don't get more selected."
It's a small nuance, but the former implies that content pieces above that are not worth it.
What it should imply is that if your goal is to show up in Google AI overviews, simply writing longer content doesn't improve your chances.
-
1 Reply
-
I dont know that you can statistically prove this – or that changing methodology wont show substantial disagreement in rates.
But – in SEO short vs long seems to have always been a content industry slant.
I will always rely on Microsoft Clarity to tell me if readers are reading, what they’re reading and how much.
I will also continue to note that despite the claims that “dwell time” is real, nothing has ever been punished for allowing users to convert in seconds and dwell time would be disastrously bad for Google.
Secondly, as I’ve psoted around the web today, Google’s Search Team’s continued insistence “We will always show the most relevant page regardless of user experience” – shows that they dont care.
Long form is an argument made, it appears, by people who charge by the word. That ahs never been a good reason for anyone to buy into it as far as I care =)
This debate is so old despite nobody ever proving that in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023….2026 people “want to read more and more”
=================
THE END
=================
-
Maybe they should publish the methodology, because as someone who has spent decades crunching data and doing research, I cannot even imagine how they reached this conclusion with a reasonably acceptable level of reliability. There are many arguments against it, and again, I have NO IDEA what methodology was used. Perhaps it’s a valid one that I simply cannot imagine.
But let’s start with the obvious. If I write a short, crappy article about cancer cells, will it really outperform a scientific paper? (Let’s assume all other conditions are equal, which is almost impossible, but for the sake of the argument.) Add to that the fact that current LLMs are basically glorified surfers that run the same searches everyone else does and then condense the results into an answer. In that context, content length is far less relevant than SERP position.
And these are just a couple of the most obvious, easy to see problems. Perhaps with a bit of explanation these issues can be addressed, but I honestly doubt it, the only thing I read here is short_length>density>entity and all AI models (all of them, no exception) work the exact opposite way.
-
Correlation does not equal causation.
-
Wait – I think I got it u/JakeHundley
What you’re saying is that measuring things like word count/form length, keyword repetition and pretending these things are factors is just an unwelcome distraction from understanding how Google works with Topical Authority?
-
As someone who does a lot of freelance SEO content writing, I’m getting a lot more customers in the last six months requesting sections written to target this sort of thing alongside snippets.
The preferred structure is like h2 sections named TLDR and FAQs. Then they want full-sentence bullet points in short sentences and small numbers.
So, if you’re wondering what the targeting mechanism is, that’s it.
Log in to reply.