Free Readability score tool.
Use the Readability Checker to automatically check the readability for any given URL. To calculate your score just enter your URL and the tool will analyse the readability score for your content using the “Flesch reading ease formula”
What is Readability?
Readability determines how easy it is for a reader to understand the content of a written text. Based on the complexity, syntax and presentation an algorithm is able to calculate the readability score of a document. This score gives you an estimate of the minimum years of education / grade level needed to understand a specific text.
Readability analysis
This tool connects to the SEO Review Tools Readability API and returns these metrics after analysing the content.
- Flesch Reading Ease
- Readability Score
- Grade level
- The total number of extracted sentences
- The total number of extracted words
- The total number of extracted characters
- The estimated reading time
- The estimated speaking time
- Avg. word length calculated in characters
- Avg. sentence length calculated in words
- Avg. paragraph length calculated in sentences
Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease formula scores
The table below shows you how to interpreted (FRES) score after testing a document with this tool.
| Score | Grade level | |
| 100.00-90.00 | 5th grade | Very easy to read. |
| 90.0–80.0 | 6th grade | Easy to read. |
| 80.0–70.0 | 7th grade | Fairly easy to read. |
| 70.0–60.0 | 8th & 9th grade | Plain English. |
| 60.0–50.0 | 10th to 12th grade | Fairly difficult to read. |
| 50.0–30.0 | College | Difficult to read. |
| 30.0–0.0 | College graduate | Very difficult to read. |
To find out more about these formulas and the algorithm behind the concepts, please visit Wikipedia.
How does readability affect SEO?
Readability doesn’t directly influence SEO. That being said, Google does use multiple ranking factors related to user experience like: Click trough rate (CTR), Bounce rate, Time on page and Returning visitors. If your text is just too hard to understand, you can expect users to leave your page before reading the full content. Hard to read content has a much bigger chance to result in: Higher bounce rates, Lower CTRs and Visitors not engaging with your content (sharing it on social, leaving a comment or linking back to your content). All these factors are very likely to have a negative impact on SEO.
How to Increase your readability Score?
- Use simple words.
- Write short sentences.
- Use headings and subheadings.
Readability formulas give you and great indication on how accessible your content is, but you shouldn’t just focus on your calculated score. It’s way more important to connect and write with your audience in mind (these are real people ;-). And depending on your audience and the topics you write about, you should choose the right index and range to use as an indication when testing a document.
Readability API
Find out more details about the Readability API →
Get the new Chrome Extension!
Updates: