---
title: What boilerplate_ratio Counts, and What It Cannot See — NanoParse Blog
url: https://nanoparse.app/blog/2026-10-31-boilerplate-ratio
description: "Litmus returns twenty signal groups in the same response body as the markdown. Two of them look like verdicts on the page: boilerplate_ratio and content_density…"
---

Litmus returns twenty signal groups in the same response body as the markdown. Two of them look like verdicts on the page: `boilerplate_ratio` and `content_density`. Both names promise more than the code delivers, and a developer ranking sources by either will rank them wrong.

Fourteen URLs were submitted to the endpoint on 2026-10-31, across six page classes. Eleven completed, three were refused as blocked. Every payload is committed beside this post, and every number below reproduces from those files — except the word counts on pages that rotate their own content, which moved by a few words on a re-run an hour later while every ratio stayed identical.

The result, sorted by `boilerplate_ratio`:

```
ratio density words content_type url
0.67 0.73 1510 documentation kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/
0.57 0.93 470 tutorial developer.mozilla.org/.../Fetch_API
0.27 0.71 555 tutorial usa.gov/
0.15 0.96 533 academic_paper en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_(text)
0.09 0.86 4156 tutorial en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
0.05 0.70 3852 academic_paper docs.python.org/3/library/json.html
0.02 1.00 1311 news_article bbc.com/news
0.01 0.81 1375 product_page stripe.com
0.00 0.50 135 general example.com
0.00 1.00 949 blog_post news.ycombinator.com
0.00 0.79 554 documentation docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/overview
```

Read as a quality ranking, that table says the Kubernetes documentation page is two-thirds junk and the Hacker News front page is perfectly clean. Both readings are wrong, and the reasons are in twenty lines of source.

## What the code counts

Three selectors, one denominator:

```
const navLen = ($("nav").text() || "").length;
const footerLen = ($("footer").text() || "").length;
const cookieLen = ($('[class*="cookie"], [id*="cookie"], [class*="consent"], [id*="consent"]').text() || "").length;
const totalLen = ($("body").text() || "").length || 1;
const boilerLen = navLen + footerLen + cookieLen;
const ratio = Math.round((boilerLen / totalLen) * 100) / 100;
return { ratio: Math.min(1, ratio), confidence: "high" };
```

Percentage of all page text that sits inside a