Your navigation might be eating your LLM reading budget ⁉️ We took a closer look at how pages are actually read in ChatGPT Deep Research, to understand what's really happening under the hood. On its first visit, Deep Research reads each page through a fixed window of about 5,700 characters. The heavier a page's navigation, the less of that budget is left for your content. We grouped pages by how many navigation links they carry: ➡️ 𝗟𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗻𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 (under 20 links) About 𝟳𝟴% of the first read is your actual content. This is what a clean, content-first page looks like. ➡️ 𝗠𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘂𝗺 (20–59 links) About 𝟱𝟱%. Nearly half the read is already spent on navigation and markup, and this is where most pages land. ➡️ 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝘃𝘆 𝗻𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 (60 links) Only about 𝟯𝟯%. Two-thirds of the read goes links before the model even reaches your answer. So on cluttered sites, more than half the reading budget is gone before your real content even begins.

This is my read on it as well, as someone who has spent 10 years hyper-focused on Google updates. There is almost always a change in documentation/communication before the big crackdown.