Watch: How big are Google’s grounding chunks?
Analysis of how Google selects content to ground Gemini-powered AI shows a fixed 2,000-word budget per query, where relevance rank determines word share.
Transcript
When Google uses your website to ground its Gemini AI, it doesn't actually read your entire page. Instead, it operates on a strict budget. For any given query, Google allocates a total budget of about two thousand words, and it splits this fixed amount among all the sources it pulls from.
Your search rank determines how much of that budget you get. The top-ranked source gets the lion's share, usually around five hundred words. By the time you get down to the fifth spot, that share is cut in half.
This also means writing longer articles won't help you get more coverage. In fact, after about fifteen hundred words, you hit a wall of diminishing returns. Google simply stops selecting more content. A tight, eight-hundred-word article might see more than half of its text used. But a massive four-thousand-word page will only see about thirteen percent of its content make the cut.
The takeaway for content strategy is clear. Density beats length. Don't try to write the longest page on the web. Instead, focus on being the most relevant, concise source for the query.