No, and it never was. Word count is not a direct ranking factor; Google does not count the words on your page and hand out position for hitting a number. That is the verdict, and it isn’t new, Google has repeated it for years, including the line that having the same word count as a top-ranking article won’t make you rank first any more than collecting USB chargers will get you to the moon.
What keeps the “longer content ranks better” myth alive is a real pattern in the data: studies do find that top-ranking pages tend to run longer, often well over a thousand words. But that is correlation, not cause. Longer pages frequently rank well because length is a side effect of doing something else right, covering the topic thoroughly, answering the sub-questions, working in the related terms, earning more links, not because the word count itself carries any weight. Strip the coverage out and the words do nothing. A padded three-thousand-word page that buries its answer loses to a tight six-hundred-word page that resolves the query cleanly.
So the thing the word count was standing in for is coverage: did the page actually answer what the searcher came for, completely enough that they have no reason to return to the results. That is the signal worth chasing, and length takes care of itself once the coverage is there. Any specific 2026 figure or study is worth re-checking at the time you write, since the averages drift, but the underlying verdict has held.
Stop writing toward a word target and start measuring whether the query is fully answered. When it is, the page is long enough, and every paragraph you add past that point to pad the count costs the page instead of helping it.