This doesn't pass the smell test for me. If I find a recipe I like I tend to spend the duration of that recipe on the website. the extra time it takes to skim to the recipe itself is a rounding error in that math. I posit the actual reason is that recipes aren't copyrightable so the websites need to add all the extra bullshit, which is copyrightable, in order to make it hard for some bot to trivially take their recipes.