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Why we put the recipe first

By CarlyApril 25, 2026

The Carly Rules, explained. No life-story preamble. No ad mazes. The recipe up top, the print stylesheet that strips ads, and a ban on "Jump to Recipe" buttons.

Most recipe sites bury the recipe. The cook walks in with a question (what do I make tonight) and gets met with eight hundred words about a chef's grandmother's kitchen and four ad refreshes before the ingredient list shows up. We hate it. So we built the resource we wanted.

The Carly Rules are the spine. Description is hard-capped at sixty words combined with editor notes. The recipe goes front and center: title, persona byline, description, image, ingredients, steps. No content blocks render between the H1 and the ingredients other than the locked layout slots. Ad slots cap at three on desktop, two on mobile. No interstitials. No autoplay video. No sticky bottoms. No ads inside the ingredients or instructions.

The print stylesheet strips every ad, every share button, the sidebar, the cross-vertical link blocks, and renders a clean branded card. Print and Share buttons are first-class UI. There is no Jump-to-Recipe button because there is no preamble to jump past.

If a recipe page on this site breaks any of these rules, email me. The build pipeline runs the Carly Test against twenty random recipes on every deploy, but no test catches everything. The brand is the trust and the trust is the rules.

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