Thin content: how to find and fix it

The page has fewer than 150 words of text in its HTML. There is no minimum word count for ranking, so this is a prompt to look, not a verdict. Often the cause is a page rendered in the browser, whose text crawlers that read plain HTML never see. Otherwise, expand the page, merge it into a stronger one, or noindex it.

Updated 28 September 2026

Severity
Warning
Issue type
thin-content
How the audit flags it
An indexable HTML page returning 2xx is flagged when the text in its <body> comes to fewer than 150 words. Scripts, styles, noscript and inline SVG are skipped. Navigation, footer and other template text are counted, so the check is conservative: a flagged page is short even with its template, and a page with a wordy template can pass while its main content is thin. Pages marked noindex are not flagged.
How to check
One URL at a time in the free SEO checker, or every page in a site audit.

What a low word count means

Length is not quality. A contact page, a tool, or a product with a short spec sheet can be exactly as long as it needs to be. Google's guidance on helpful content is about whether a page satisfies the person who arrives, not how many words it has.

What a low count does reliably tell you is that the page has little for a search engine to match against a query. Among many thin pages, some are fine, some are placeholders that should never have been published, and some are full pages whose text the crawler could not see.

Check rendering first

If a page looks full in the browser but the audit counted almost no words, the text is being added by JavaScript after the page loads. The audit reads the HTML your server sends, as many crawlers do. Google can render JavaScript, but it processes rendering separately from crawling, and many AI crawlers do not render it at all.

View the page source and search for a sentence you can see on screen. If it is missing from the source, the fix is server-side rendering or prerendering for that route, not more writing. On a single-page app this usually affects every page, which shows up as the same issue across the whole crawl.

How to fix it

For each page whose text is in the HTML, decide which of three it is.

  • Worth ranking and too short: expand it with what a searcher needs, such as the answer, the specifics, examples, and the next step. Add substance, not padding.
  • Overlapping with a stronger page: merge the useful parts into that page and 301-redirect this one to it.
  • Needed by visitors but not by searchers (tag archives, empty categories, account pages): add noindex, or remove it from the sitemap.

Tag and category archives with one or two posts, and programmatically generated pages whose only difference is a swapped name, are the most common thin pages on small sites. Fix the rule that generates them, not the pages one at a time.

The free SEO checker reports the word count for one URL from its server HTML, which is the quickest way to tell a rendering problem from a genuinely short page.

Fix it with a coding agent

Connect Claude Code, Cursor or Codex to IndexZero's MCP server, open your site's repo, and paste:

Run a site audit of example.com and wait until it completes. Read the thin-content issues. For five of the URLs, fetch the server HTML and compare it with what the page shows in a browser, and tell me whether the text is missing from the HTML. For pages whose text is really short, sort them into expand, merge or noindex, with a reason for each. Don't change anything until I've approved the list.

Behind that prompt the agent calls run_site_audit, polls get_audit_status until the crawl completes, and reads get_audit_issues with issueType: "thin-content". Your repo is where the fix happens: IndexZero reads your site and never changes it.

Frequently asked questions

Is 150 words the minimum for SEO?
No. There is no minimum. It is a threshold for review: below it, a page is short enough that it is worth a look.
Can thin pages hurt the rest of my site?
A handful will not. A large share of low-value pages can weigh on how search engines assess the whole site, which is why tag archives and near-empty generated pages are worth consolidating or noindexing.

Audit the whole site

Find every page with this issue

An agent connected to IndexZero's MCP server can crawl the whole site, read the issues of one type, find the templates in your repo and fix them, then re-crawl to confirm. The crawl itself spends no credits; only the optional Lighthouse sample does. The free plan includes the MCP server, audits of up to 50 pages, and 2,000 credits a month.

Start freeHow to connect an agent

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