Readability Score Calculator
Paste any text to instantly calculate six readability scores. Understand what grade level your writing targets and optimize for your audience — whether you're writing blog posts, marketing copy, technical docs, or academic papers.
Scores Explained
Flesch Reading Ease — 0 to 100 scale. Higher = easier to read. Most web content should aim for 60-70. Flesch-Kincaid Grade — US school grade level needed to understand the text. Gunning Fog — Years of formal education needed. Accounts for complex words (3+ syllables). Coleman-Liau — Based on characters per word rather than syllables, making it more consistent. SMOG — "Simple Measure of Gobbledygook" — estimates years of education needed, focused on polysyllabic words. ARI — Uses character and word counts instead of syllables for faster computation.
See also: the Featured Snippet Preview to check whether your content's structure will support a paragraph or list snippet; and the Heading Hierarchy Checker to validate the heading outline that complements your readability score.
See also: readability is one input to the Page Experience signal — the Core Web Vitals Cheatsheet covers the performance side, and the Link Health Checker catches anchor-text patterns that hurt comprehension.
When the Score Matters Most
Readability scoring is most useful when the audience and the channel are known in advance. A technical white paper for engineers can sit at Flesch-Kincaid grade 14 and be exactly right; the same number on a consumer landing page is a problem. The scores are calibrated to roughly match a US grade level, so the goal is to match the level to the reader rather than to push every piece down to grade 8.
Three writing contexts where this tool earns its keep: healthcare and public-service communication, where guidelines from the CDC, the Plain Writing Act, and most state health departments target a grade 6 to 8 reading level for the general public; financial product disclosures, where consumer-protection regulators have been increasingly explicit that fine print written above grade 12 will be treated as functionally undisclosed; and email marketing, where independent send-list studies consistently show that subject lines and preview text written below grade 7 outperform their more-elaborate counterparts on open rate. For brand and editorial writing where the voice is the product, the score is informational only — do not let it flatten the prose.
Frequently Asked Questions
Built by Derek Giordano · Part of Ultimate Design Tools