THE SHORT ANSWER
Chunking is done to your page, not by you. A retrieval system splits the text using fixed sizes, recursive separators or heading boundaries, and the resulting fragments are what compete for retrieval. Your influence is structural: write sections of roughly eighty to two hundred words that make sense cold, put headings where a split would be natural, and keep any list or worked example short enough to survive intact inside one fragment.
There is a small industry explaining chunking strategies to engineers who are building their own retrieval systems. Almost none of that material is written for the person standing on the other side of the fence, whose published pages are being chunked by somebody else's code, with settings they will never see and have no way to negotiate over.
That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is also the thing that makes the topic tractable. You cannot choose the strategy, so the practical goal becomes writing text that survives any of the common ones intact. Fortunately the common strategies fail in much the same ways, which means a single set of writing habits covers most of the exposure.
The numbers, at a glance
Fixed-size splitting: cuts at a token count regardless of meaning, which can slice a sentence or separate a figure from its label
Recursive splitting: tries paragraph breaks first, then sentences, then characters, so paragraph structure is doing real work
Heading-aware splitting: cuts on H2 and H3 boundaries, which is why heading placement is a retrieval decision
Safe section length: roughly eighty to two hundred words, short enough to survive a small chunk size and long enough to say something
The three ways your page gets cut up
Fixed-size splitting is the crudest and still widely used: count tokens, cut, repeat, often with a small overlap between neighbours to soften the damage. It has no idea what a sentence is. A number and the label explaining it can end up in different fragments, at which point the number is worthless to whichever one keeps it.
Recursive splitting is smarter, attempting the largest natural separator that fits the size budget, usually double line breaks first. Heading-aware splitting is smarter again, treating each H2 or H3 section as the unit. The trend across production systems is towards the structure-aware end, which is good news, because it means your document outline directly determines the fragments.
What a well-chunked section looks like
It names its subject in the first sentence. Not it, not this, not the above. The actual noun, because the reader of this fragment has no idea what page it came from.
It states the conclusion before the reasoning. Partial attention lands at the top, and truncation removes the bottom.
It carries at least one concrete anchor. A range, a date, a threshold, a named standard. Something that makes the fragment worth choosing over an interchangeable one.
It is short enough to survive. Eighty to two hundred words means the whole thought fits inside one fragment under most size settings.
It keeps paired information adjacent. Label next to value, condition next to consequence, never separated by an intervening paragraph.
The patterns that get destroyed by chunking
Long lists are the most common casualty. A fifteen-item list split across two fragments produces one fragment of orphaned items with no introduction and another with an introduction and half the content. Keep lists to five to eight items, and give each item enough context to make sense on its own rather than relying on the stem sentence above.
Narrative build-up is the second. Any structure that establishes a premise in one section and resolves it three sections later loses the resolution entirely, because the fragment containing the payoff reads as an unsupported assertion. Comparison structures suffer the same way when option A and option B end up in different fragments and the reader of one has no idea what it is being compared with.
A practical test you can run on any page
Copy your page into a plain text editor and cut it into pieces of about a hundred and fifty words with no regard for where the boundaries fall. Read each piece as though it were the only thing you had. Score it: does it name its subject, does it state something specific, would you be willing to quote it with your name attached?
Most pages score badly on the first attempt, and the failures cluster in exactly two places: opening paragraphs that spend their length on context before saying anything, and later sections that depend on earlier ones through pronouns. Both are cheap to fix and the fix improves the page for human skim-readers at the same time, which is the usual pattern with retrieval work.
Chunk-proofing an existing page
Break every section longer than two hundred words into two with their own headings.
Rewrite the first sentence of each section so it names the subject explicitly.
Split any list over eight items into two lists with separate introductions.
Move each section's conclusion from the last sentence to the first.
Cut the page into arbitrary 150-word slices and reject any slice that cannot stand alone.
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Related answers
Frequently asked questions
Can I control how my page is chunked?
Not directly, and no markup instructs a third-party system where to cut. What you control is structure: clear heading boundaries, self-contained sections and short paragraphs make the natural split points fall in sensible places under every common strategy. That indirect control turns out to be most of the control worth having.
Does chunk overlap mean I can relax about this?
Overlap is usually small, often a sentence or two, and it exists to reduce damage rather than eliminate it. Relying on it to reconnect a section with the context it needs is a bet on someone else's configuration, which is not a position worth taking.
Should I add more headings to force smaller chunks?
Add headings where they genuinely mark a change of subject. Fragmenting a page with headings every fifty words produces sections too thin to answer anything and reads badly to a human. The section should be as long as the thought requires and no longer.
How does this apply to a pricing page?
Pricing pages are unusually vulnerable, because a figure separated from its conditions becomes actively misleading. Keep each price adjacent to what it includes, what it excludes and the date it applies from, all inside the same short block rather than spread across the page.
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