Readability Checker
Paste your content and get an instant readability score, sentence analysis, and suggestions for improving clarity. Free, no sign-up required.
Paste your content and get an instant readability score, sentence analysis, and suggestions for improving clarity. Free, no sign-up required.
Paste your content and click Check readability to see your score and suggestions.
Paste your content into the text area and click Check readability. The tool analyzes your text instantly, no API call needed, and returns a Flesch Reading Ease score, grade level, word count, average sentence length, and a set of specific suggestions for improving clarity.
For the most accurate results, paste at least 100 words. Short snippets can produce unreliable scores because there aren't enough sentences to average properly.
The Flesch Reading Ease score rates text on a scale from 0 to 100. Higher scores mean easier to read. A score of 60 to 70 is considered plain English suitable for most web audiences. Scores below 30 indicate very complex text suited to academic or technical writing. Most blog content performs best between 60 and 80.
For general blog content and marketing copy, aim for a Grade 6 to 8 reading level. This doesn't mean your content is simplistic, it means your sentences are concise and your word choices are clear. Most major publications including the BBC and major US newspapers write at around a Grade 8 level by design.
The Flesch Reading Ease formula measures two things: average sentence length and average syllables per word. It can't judge whether your argument makes sense, it measures mechanical friction, the decoding effort each sentence demands. Scores of 60 to 80 represent plain English, the range where most successful web content lives. The companion Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level translates the same math into school grades: the Grade 6 to 8 range is the standard target for general web audiences. This isn't writing for uneducated readers, major newspapers and bestselling nonfiction deliberately sit at Grade 8 or below, because reading effort is a tax every reader prefers paying less of.
Since the formula only measures sentence length and word length, you have exactly two levers, and sentence length has far more travel. Any sentence over 25 words is a splitting candidate: look for "and," "which," and "however" holding two thoughts together, and give each its own sentence. Then swap inflated vocabulary for plain equivalents, utilize becomes use, approximately becomes about, facilitate becomes help. None of those swaps lose meaning; the long versions were never adding any. Two exceptions worth respecting: never trade a precise technical term for a vague short one just to move the score, and content for expert audiences can legitimately run harder than the general-web target.
Google doesn't score readability directly, but it measures what readers do. Hard-to-read pages get abandoned faster, and when searchers bounce back to results and click a competitor, that repeated pattern tells Google your page didn't satisfy the query. Readable content also compounds: it earns more shares, more links, more finished reads, more return visits. The score is best understood as a proxy for whether people actually finish what you wrote, which is the thing that actually ranks.
Don't check readability while drafting; it makes you self-conscious and slows composition. Write the complete draft, paste it here, then fix flagged problems in one editing pass. Most writers discover their difficulty clusters in specific spots, usually long explanatory sentences in the middle of paragraphs. Fix those, re-check, publish. The whole cycle adds five minutes and routinely rescues content that would otherwise lose half its readers by the third paragraph. For the full picture, including three readability myths worth ignoring, see our guide on what readability score to aim for.
Take this sentence, scoring in the difficult range: "The implementation of the aforementioned strategy necessitates the utilization of additional resources that were not previously allocated within the existing budgetary framework." Thirty words, heavy vocabulary, a single dense clause. Rewritten: "This strategy needs more budget than we originally planned." Nine words, plain vocabulary, the same information. That single edit moves the sentence from roughly Grade 16 to Grade 6, and it's the same kind of edit, splitting and simplifying, that a readability checker flags across an entire draft.
The Flesch Reading Ease score rates text on a scale from 0 to 100. Higher scores mean easier to read. A score of 60 to 70 is considered plain English suitable for most web audiences.
For general blog content and marketing copy, aim for a Grade 6 to 8 reading level. This produces concise sentences and clear word choices without making content feel simplistic.
Paste your content into the text area and click Check readability. The tool analyzes your text instantly and returns a Flesch Reading Ease score, grade level, word count, average sentence length, and improvement suggestions.
Yes. The Writstack Readability Checker is completely free with no account or sign-up required. It runs entirely in your browser with no data sent to a server.