Readability Checker

The readability checker scores text with six established formulas: Flesch Reading Ease, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index. Each one estimates how hard text is to read from counts such as words per sentence, syllables per word or letters per word. It also lists the longest sentences, which are usually the easiest place to make text clearer.

Flesch Reading Ease runs from about 0 to 100, where higher is easier: 60 to 70 is plain English, and most web content does well at 60 or above. The grade-level formulas give a US school grade, so 8 means a typical 13 or 14 year old could follow it. The formulas were designed for English, and they measure surface features, not meaning, so a short sentence full of jargon can still score well.

Google doesn't rank pages by readability scores. Clear writing matters because people understand it and find what they came for, which is what search engines try to reward. Syllables are counted with rules rather than a dictionary, so scores can differ slightly from other tools; compare drafts in the same tool.