Check this study.
Megamenu were a pain in ass already in the past for a classic SEO; it seems they so also for AI Search.
Your navigation might be eating your LLM reading budget โ๏ธ
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:
โก๏ธ ๐๐ถ๐ด๐ต๐ ๐ป๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ด๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป (under 20 links) About ๐ณ๐ด% of the first read is your actual content. This is what a clean, content-first page looks like.
โก๏ธ ๐ ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ถ๐๐บ (20โ59 links) About ๐ฑ๐ฑ%. Nearly half the read is already spent on navigation and markup, and this is where most pages land.
โก๏ธ ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ ๐ป๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ด๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป (60 links) Only about ๐ฏ๐ฏ%. 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.