What is thin content, and how thin is too thin?
You have short pages and you cannot tell whether they are efficient or a liability.
Thin means unhelpful, not short
A two-hundred-word page that completely answers a narrow question is not thin. A two-thousand-word page that circles a topic without answering anything is. The engine is modelling satisfaction, not length.
The practical test
Would a person who typed this query and landed here get what they came for, without going anywhere else? If yes, the page is not thin at any length. If no, adding words will not fix it.
Where sites actually get into trouble
Scale. Sixty pages that are genuinely different is a catalogue. Six thousand pages generated from one template with a variable swapped is a pattern that gets handled as a block, and the ratio does not improve with volume, it just multiplies.
Thin is about redundancy, not word count
A 200-word page that answers a question exactly is not thin. A 2,000-word page that restates what four other pages already say is. The word count heuristic survives because it is easy to measure, not because it predicts anything. Google is judging whether the page adds a reason to exist, and length is a poor proxy for that.
The test that actually predicts it
Remove your brand name and read the page next to the top three results for its query. If a reader could not tell why yours should exist, it is thin regardless of length. Applied across a programmatic set, this test would have caught the 22 pages here that earned zero clicks before they were ever published.
Measured, not asserted
93 of 160 pages on this site earned under ten clicks. None was penalised, because each does the job named in its query. The template survived because the pages are working tools, not descriptions of tools.
Free tool for this: SERP Audit. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 36 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.