The CMS reports a blog post as 2,400 words. Reading it, that feels generous. Export the field and the reason appears: the count includes every tag, class name and inline style in the body HTML.
Measuring what readers actually see
Strip the markup, then count. A post that claimed 2,400 words routinely lands nearer 1,400 — and 1,400 is the number that matters, because it is what a reader encounters and what a search engine evaluates as content.
Why the inflated figure causes real problems
Content briefs specify word counts. Writers hit them in a system that counts markup, so a brief asking for 2,000 words gets delivered at 1,200 words of actual prose. Everyone believes the spec was met, and the thin-content problem that follows has no obvious cause.
Where else this bites
Meta description fields containing stray entities, product descriptions pasted from a supplier's HTML, and imported content where the markup arrives escaped and renders as visible tags on the live page.
Try it: Remove HTML / BBCode Tags on SeoWolf's Notepad.