Reading Level Checker

Is your copy harder to read than it needs to be?

Writers rarely notice when sentences grow long or vocabulary drifts toward jargon. A readability formula gives you a quick, neutral second opinion. This checker runs two of the best known, Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, over any English text you paste in. Both formulas combine sentence length with word length measured in syllables. The tool reports the scores together with the raw counts behind them, and it processes everything locally.

Step by step

1. Take the main copy of the page, leaving out navigation, footers and code, and paste it into the text box.
2. Press "Analyze Reading Level". If the box is empty, you get a prompt to add text.
3. Look at the grade figure first: it estimates the years of US schooling a reader needs. Then look at the ease figure, where a higher number means simpler text.
4. Use the table to diagnose. If words per sentence is high, split sentences. If syllables per word is high, swap long words for short ones where the meaning allows.
5. Edit, paste the revised version and compare.

What to watch for

This is a lightweight counter, and some writing styles fool it. Every period ends a sentence in its eyes, so abbreviations, version numbers and web addresses split sentences in odd places and pull the score toward easy. Bullet lists and subheadings with no closing punctuation get glued to the sentence after them, which pushes it toward hard. The syllable count is a rule-based guess from vowel patterns rather than a dictionary lookup, and it only handles the letters a to z, so non-English text produces numbers that mean nothing. The ease labels (Very Easy through Very Difficult) are the tool's own five bands, a little coarser than the traditional Flesch table.

Questions people ask

What score should I aim for?

The tool suggests grade 7 to 9, and a Reading Ease of 60 to 70, for general audiences. Content for specialists, such as legal or medical professionals, can reasonably score higher. Match the reader, not a number.

Is readability a Google ranking factor?

Google has not published any readability formula as part of its ranking systems. What it does emphasize is content that is helpful and easy for people to use, and clear writing supports that. Use the score as an editing aid.

Why does my score change when I remove a list?

Lists often lack periods, so the checker reads a whole list plus the following sentence as one very long sentence. Removing or punctuating the list shortens the average and lowers the grade.

Further reading: Content Formatting for Scannability: Structuring Pages People and Crawlers Read and Measuring Content Quality Objectively.

The same tool is also published on the static mirror at seoprocheck.github.io, and the rest of the set is on the free tools page.