Content and snippets
Readability checker
Paste any text, or point it at a page, and get a Flesch reading ease score, a grade level and your text back with the long sentences and likely passive voice marked.
Free · No signup · Runs in your browser
The scores update as you type. Your text stays in your browser. The formulas were designed for English.
How it works
Paste your text, or switch to From a URL and enter the address of a public page.
The scores update as you type. Pasted text is scored in your browser and never leaves your device.
Work through the marked sentences, shortest fix first, and watch the score move.
What the readability scores mean
Readability formulas count two things: how long your sentences are, and how long your words are, measured in syllables. Longer sentences and longer words make a text harder to follow. None of the formulas read for meaning, so treat them as a measure of effort, not of quality.
- Flesch reading ease runs from 0 to 100. Higher is easier. 60 to 70 is usually labelled plain English; under 30 is very difficult, the territory of academic papers and legal contracts.
- Flesch-Kincaid grade level turns the same counts into a US school grade. A grade of 8 means a typical 13 to 14-year-old could follow it.
- Gunning Fog counts words of three or more syllables instead of every syllable, and estimates the years of schooling a reader needs.
What a good score looks like
For a page written for the general public, a reading ease of 60 or higher is a sensible target, roughly grade 8 to 9. That isn't writing for children: busy adults on a phone prefer plain text too, because it's quicker to scan for the answer they came for.
Specialist audiences are different. A guide for tax accountants or a medical study will score lower because the words it needs are long, and that's fine. Don't swap a precise term your readers use for a vague one just to raise the number. Cut the long words that carry no meaning instead: "utilise" for "use", "in order to" for "to".
How to make text easier to read
- Split any sentence over 25 words. Most break cleanly at "and", "but", "which" or a semicolon.
- Give each sentence one idea, and each paragraph one point.
- Put the action first. "We send the invoice" is shorter and clearer than "the invoice is sent by us".
- Turn a sentence with three or more items into a list.
- Replace the long words in the list below with shorter ones where the meaning survives.
Fix the marked sentences before you chase the score: shortening the five longest usually moves it more than rewording fifty short ones.
Readability and SEO
Google doesn't publish a readability score, and nothing it has said suggests it ranks pages by a Flesch number. What it does say, in its guidance on helpful content, is that it wants pages written for people. Text that people finish, understand and act on is the point; the score is just a quick way to spot text that people won't.
There's a second reason that matters more each year. AI assistants and Google's AI answers tend to quote short, self-contained sentences that answer a question directly. A clear 18-word sentence is easy to lift. A 60-word sentence with three clauses usually gets paraphrased, or skipped for a page that said it more simply.
What this checker can't tell you
The formulas were designed for English, and syllables are estimated from spelling, so scores for other languages, names and technical terms are rough. Passive voice is spotted from the wording (a form of "to be" followed by a word like "written" or "sent"), so some marks will be adjectives, like "is closed". That's why the tool says "likely".
It can't judge whether your text is accurate, well organised or right for your audience. From a URL, it reads the page's main text from its HTML before JavaScript runs, with menus and footers left out. If a page builds its text with JavaScript, copy the text from your browser and paste it instead.
Questions people ask
What is a good Flesch reading ease score?
For a page aimed at the general public, 60 or higher, the band usually labelled plain English. 70 and above reads easily on a phone. Specialist content can score lower and still suit its readers.
What grade level should web content be written at?
Many plain-language guides suggest around grade 8 for public-facing pages. It's a guide, not a rule: aim for the lowest grade that still lets you say exactly what you mean.
Does readability affect Google rankings?
Not as a score that we know of. Google says it rewards helpful content written for people, and readable text is more likely to be read, understood and quoted, including by AI answers.
Is the passive voice always wrong?
No. It's useful when the person doing the action doesn't matter or isn't known, as in "the site was launched in 2019". It becomes a problem when it hides who does what, or makes every sentence longer.
Does it work for languages other than English?
The counts work, but the formulas and the syllable estimate were built for English, so treat the scores as rough for other languages. The long-sentence marks are still useful.
Is my text stored anywhere?
No. Pasted text is scored in your browser and isn't sent to us. In From a URL mode we read the public page to get its text, the same way a search engine would.
Want it done for you?
Romeo rewrites the hard parts of every page
He finds the pages where long, tangled sentences are getting in the way, rewrites them in plain English without losing your keywords or facts, and sends each edit for you to approve.
