What this means
Token Bloat Ratio = Total HTML bytes / Useful text bytes. A ratio of 20× means only 5% of your page is useful content. The rest is HTML tags, navigation, inline scripts, CSS, and framework overhead. When AI crawlers (or RAG systems) process your pages, they waste context window space on this noise.
Why it matters for AI visibility
Token bloat directly affects Extractability Score via Bloat Efficiency: BloatEfficiency = clamp(100 / TokenBloatRatio × 5, 0, 100). A page with 20× bloat gets a Bloat Efficiency of only 25/100. It also inflates Crawl Cost, making crawlers less likely to crawl your site thoroughly.
Common causes
- Heavy navigation and footer repeated on every page
- Next.js
__NEXT_DATA__ JSON payload (can be 50–200KB)
- Inline CSS-in-JS styles (Styled Components, Emotion)
- Analytics, tracking, ad scripts embedded inline
- Large SVG icon libraries rendered inline
- Duplicated component state / hydration data
How to fix it
Next.js
- Use React Server Components to avoid sending component code to the client
- Move large data fetching to server components (eliminates
__NEXT_DATA__ bloat)
- Use
next/dynamic with ssr: false for heavy interactive components
- Enable automatic static optimization for pages that don't need SSR
WordPress
- Remove unused plugins that inject scripts/styles on every page
- Use a caching plugin (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache) to minify HTML
- Simplify complex page builder layouts to plain HTML
- Move analytics/tracking to an external script tag instead of inline
React SPA
- Code-split with React.lazy() to reduce initial bundle
- Move inline styles to external CSS files
- Avoid rendering large navigation components in the initial HTML
Shopify
- Minimize Liquid sections on product pages
- Remove unused theme features and apps that inject HTML
- Lazy-load non-critical sections below the fold
General (all stacks)
- Put primary content early in the DOM (before navigation if possible)
- Move large scripts to external files with
async or defer
- Minify HTML output
- Remove inline SVG icons and use an external sprite sheet
How to validate the fix
- Run the Token Bloat tool — target a ratio below 15×.
- Re-run your AI Readiness Scan — Extractability and Crawl Cost should improve.
- Use the AI Chunking tool to verify that chunks now contain meaningful content.