Free checker · Content and Writing
Reading Level Checker.
Runs five readability formulas and reports the median grade, then lists your longest sentences — which is the part you can actually act on. Splitting three of them moves the score further than any other edit.
Body text only. At least a hundred words, or the formulas swing wildly on a single long sentence.
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What this tool measures
Runs five readability formulas over a piece of text, reports the median grade, and then lists the sentences that produced it.
The score is the least useful part. Every one of these formulas reduces a page to two numbers — average sentence length and average syllables per word — so a grade level tells you almost nothing you could act on. The list of your longest sentences underneath tells you exactly what to change, and splitting three of them will move the score further than rewriting every word.
They are also English-only. Applied to Arabic, Urdu or French they will still produce a confident-looking number, and that number will mean nothing. The tool says so rather than hiding it.
How to use it
Paste at least a hundred words of body copy. Below that the formulas swing by several grade levels on a single long sentence, so the tool declines to score rather than printing noise.
Then set the sentence threshold to whatever you consider long and read the list. Twenty-five words is a reasonable default; twenty is stricter and useful for landing pages.
How to read the result
Five formulas are shown because they disagree, sometimes by two or three grades on the same paragraph. Coleman–Liau and ARI work from characters per word, the others from syllables, and each was calibrated on a different corpus. The median is steadier than any of them individually, which is why it is the headline.
The common advice is to aim for grade 8 to 10 for a general audience. That is a reasonable default and it is not a rule. A page selling structural engineering to structural engineers should read like one; simplifying it would cost credibility and buy nothing.
The passive-voice list is a loose match and will catch some adjectives. Passive voice is not a fault — it is correct when the actor is unknown or irrelevant. It is worth looking at when it appears in nearly every sentence, because that usually means nobody in the copy is doing anything.
What to do next
Take the three longest sentences and split each into two. That is the whole intervention. It will move every score on the page, and unlike vocabulary changes it never costs precision.
Resist the urge to simplify words. The formulas reward short words because short words correlate with plain writing, not because they cause it — swapping accurate terms for vaguer shorter ones improves the number and damages the page.
Questions people ask
Is readability a ranking factor?
No. Google has said repeatedly that it does not score readability directly. What it does measure is whether people who arrive stay and are satisfied, and readability affects that. The path from one to the other is real and indirect.
What reading level should I aim for?
Grade 8 to 10 suits a general audience and most marketing copy. Match the audience rather than the number: a legal or medical page written at grade 6 reads as condescending, and one written at grade 16 does not get read at all.
Why do the five formulas disagree?
Because they measure different proxies. Two count characters per word, three count syllables, and each was calibrated against a different set of texts decades ago. Their disagreement is a fair reminder of how approximate all of them are.
Does it work on Arabic?
No, and neither does any other readability tool that claims to. These formulas count English syllables using English spelling rules. The word and sentence counts stay accurate for any language; the grades do not.
Where to go from here
- Word and Character Counter — The counts, and the fields the text has to fit inside.
- Keyword Density Checker — Whether the page says the thing it was written to say.
- Content Gap Analyzer — Whether it covers what the pages beating it cover.
The guide behind this tool
Built by GoDesign FZE, who write and ship page copy that converts.
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