As you scroll that's more opportunities to show you ads.

Sure for the sites that show ads. But I'm taking about the ones where they literally just put the story in to rank higher in search results. The ones just doing it to share their recipe.

It doesnt have to be a conscious process for everyone. It could be that google just prefers to show you pages with these patterns even if most pages dont. Or could be writers that dont do this quit because no one reads them.

Some people legit just enjoy reading & writing that content.

Same reason, more room to cram ads you have to scroll past to see the actual recipe.

I have a small personal recipe blog. I tend to structure my posts like this:

1. Ingredients.

2. Instructions.

3. Notes/thoughts/musings/etc.

Sometimes section 3 is quite long, sometimes it's completely absent. It is *never" the first thing you see, ever. Why? Despite the fact that I'm one of the people who enjoys reading/writing that kind of stuff, most of the time when I'm looking at my blog I'm looking for ingredients ratios and instructions, so they are first.

I don't want to have to scroll through a bunch of noise when I'm trying to cook. Just like the reviews on sites like Amazon don't appear on the page before a picture of the product and its price/description, so are reflections on a recipe out of place before the recipe itself has been listed.

I've only recently noticed that a lot of recipe websites do have those links, but a lot of them are styled like the "share this on X" buttons or very faint that I've been instinctively blind to them for years.