Compounding the problem, the 2000 word essay is sometimes really useful if it's describing a technique used in the recipe (cf Stella Parks' recipe for homemade

Compounding the problem, the 2000 word essay is sometimes really useful if it's describing a technique used in the recipe (cf Stella Parks' recipe for homemade bagels on Serious Eats: https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-bagels-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/homemade-bagels-recipe). But somehow only spammy blogs with plagiarized recipes, AI-generated "essays," and affiliate links for every ingredient and tool used make it into the first page of results on Google (or DDG, for that matter). At some point, Google must have moved away from using site-level reputation in search rankings, as I almost never see recipes from reputable sources like King Arthur Baking, Serious Eats, or Food52 in the first page of results.