Readability Grader
Enter a URL and we'll fetch the page on our servers and grade it — or paste text to get real Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and Gunning Fog scores computed right in your browser. URL mode needs a free sign-in; paste mode doesn't.
What a readability checker actually measures
A readability checker doesn't judge your ideas — it measures two mechanical things: how long your sentences are, and how many syllables your words have. Every formula on this page (Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog) is built from those same two inputs, just weighted differently. That's why they usually agree with each other: text with short sentences and short words scores well on all three, and text stuffed with 4-syllable words and 40-word sentences scores poorly on all three.
The reason this matters for SEO is indirect but real. Google has never confirmed a "readability" ranking factor, and it doesn't need to — readability correlates with the content that already tends to rank and get cited, because easy-to-parse text is also easy for a crawler, a snippet extractor, or an AI answer engine to lift a clean quote from. Dense, jargon-heavy paragraphs are harder for all of those systems to summarize accurately, so they get skipped in favor of a competitor who said the same thing more plainly.
Why readability affects both Google rankings and AI citations
When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews generate an answer, they're pulling from source text and trying to represent it faithfully in a sentence or two. A paragraph that already reads like a clean, self-contained answer — short sentences, a clear subject, no buried qualifiers — is far easier to extract and attribute correctly. A paragraph that takes 45 words to say one thing usually gets paraphrased loosely or ignored.
This is the same logic behind seosorted's AI Content Score Checker: structure and clarity aren't just nice-to-haves for human readers, they're increasingly the difference between getting cited by an AI engine and getting silently passed over.
How to use this readability checker
- Fastest path: enter the page's URL and let us fetch and extract the main text for you — this runs live on seosorted's servers, so it asks for a free sign-in.
- In paste mode, paste plain text, not raw HTML — strip out tags first so word and sentence counts stay accurate. Pasted text is scored entirely in your browser.
- Check a full article, not just the intro — readability often drifts as writers get into technical detail later in a piece.
- Target Flesch Reading Ease of roughly 60-70 for general web content, or a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 7-9, unless you're deliberately writing for a technical or academic audience.
- Use the passive-voice and long-sentence flags below the score as a punch list — fixing even a handful of flagged sentences usually moves the score meaningfully.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good readability score for a blog post?
Most web content that performs well in Google and AI Overviews sits at a Flesch Reading Ease of 60-70, roughly a 7th-9th grade reading level. Technical or B2B SaaS content can run slightly lower, but anything under 30 is genuinely hard to read for most people.
What's the difference between Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level?
Both use the same inputs (sentence length and syllables per word) but report them differently. Flesch Reading Ease is a 0-100 score where higher means easier to read. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level converts the same math into a US school grade, so a score of 8 means the text reads like 8th-grade material.
Is a readability score checker accurate for every type of writing?
These formulas measure sentence length and syllable count, not meaning, so they can be fooled by short sentences that are still confusing, or long sentences that are still clear. Use the score as a directional signal alongside an actual read-through, not a replacement for one.
Does readability actually affect SEO rankings?
Readability isn't a direct Google ranking factor, but it correlates strongly with the content that does rank and get cited by AI engines, because easier-to-parse text is easier for both users and language models to extract a clean answer from.
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