Thanks to Jan-Willem Bobbink for the LinkedIn post that gave me the idea for COWAF. He’d rewritten some important pages for a client so ChatGPT and Perplexity could pick up individual passages more easily. He reported about 10% more retrieval and 6% more clicks from those two platforms. After a month, Google organic traffic was down 20%. Google was sending the client far more traffic in the first place, so Jan rolled the changes back.
The bit that got me was what they’d taken out. The client had its own way of explaining things and examples from work it had actually done. Those went because they made the paragraphs harder to retrieve on their own.
Jan suspects that losing those details contributed to the drop in Google. They changed the structure and the content at the same time, so there’s only so much we can tell from the numbers. Still, imagine having a page full of things your competitors could have written and deciding to cut the bit they couldn’t.
I say that as an SEO. Give us a promising idea and about six weeks and we’ll have found a way to overdo it. Apparently we’re GEOs now, so perhaps we can do it in one week now.
Remember when we FAQed the shit out of everything?
People had questions. We answered them. Then Google gave us expandable FAQ results and, before long, we were finding questions for answers we already had.
There was money in doing it, or at least traffic. In one SearchPilot test (from 2021), they took the headings on some job pages, turned them into questions and added FAQ markup. The answers were the copy that was already there. Some of the new headings sounded a bit forced, but the pages got rich results and SearchPilot estimated a 3% uplift in organic traffic. You can almost hear somebody in the next meeting saying, “Right. How many other pages have we got and how can we FAQ the shit out of them?”
Google restricted FAQ rich results in 2023 and stopped showing them in May 2026. I’m sure there are still FAQs out there answering questions nobody has asked, other than the SEO who needed four of them by Thursday.
How many words in a chunk, then?
If it takes me three paragraphs to get to the answer, by all means move it up. If my heading is “Things to Consider” and the section is about whether your garden office will fit through the kitchen, please change the heading. We could do all this years ago. I think we called it editing.
But now we have rule and according to rankscale we should count out 50–120 words per paragraph, with 70–90 as the suggested default, and paste every paragraph into a blank document to see whether it makes sense on its own. We used to pad an article until it hit a word count. At least we only had to count it once.
There’s a reason retrieval systems work with passages. There’s also a reason why passages need context. Anthropic experimented with putting context back into those passages. A line saying revenue rose by 3% is easy enough to read. On its own, it leaves two fairly obvious questions. Whose revenue? When? Adding that detail helped retrieval in Anthropic’s tests. And if it’s Google you’re doing this for, Google’s own AI search guidance says you can spare yourself the job of cutting everything into tiny pieces.
COWAF — Cut Out Waffle And Fluff
I felt the industry could do with another acronym. Here you go.
Back to the garden office. Your page starts with a paragraph about how working from home has transformed the way we live. Further down, your installation team has explained that the standard quote assumes there’s a clear route down the side of the house. If the panels have to come through the kitchen, they need the doorway width and a photo of any tight turns before they can give you a price.
Cut the bit about the way we live. Keep the kitchen.
And while you’re at it, resist the temptation to tidy the installer’s advice into “Please ensure suitable access.” It’s shorter, certainly. I still don’t know whether the bloody thing will go through my kitchen.
That’s about as complicated as COWAF needs to get. Before cutting a sentence, ask what info will be lost and if somebody would find it useful. Sometimes the answer is ten wasted seconds, sometimes it’s the one thing they came to the page to find out.
You can even put that in an FAQ. If somebody asks.