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June 5, 2026

# What Is Readability & Word Counter? A Practical Guide to Content Readability

Readability isn't an SEO ranking factor Google confirms directly, but it correlates strongly with time-on-page and bounce rate — both of which do feed into how a search engine judges whether a result actually satisfied the query.

Readability & Word Counter exists to solve one specific, recurring problem: content readability is easy to get wrong by hand, tedious to check manually across a whole site, and quick to fix once you can actually see it clearly. That's the gap Readability & Word Counter fills.

In practice, this usually comes up in one of two situations — you're setting things up correctly from the start on a new page or site, or you're auditing something that already exists and trying to find what's silently broken. Both are worth doing regularly, not just once.

A few things worth keeping in mind:
- Match reading level to audience and intent — a technical B2B audience tolerates denser writing than a general consumer query does; there's no single universal target score.
- Break up long paragraphs and use subheadings every 200-300 words — this affects perceived readability on screen more than sentence-level word choice does.
- Use shorter sentences for the direct-answer parts of a page (especially anything targeting a featured snippet) and allow more complexity in supporting detail.

It's also worth knowing what commonly goes wrong here. Chasing a specific readability score as the goal itself, producing choppy, overly simplistic writing that undersells genuinely technical topics. And avoiding these is usually less about effort and more about knowing to check in the first place.

This connects to a few other things worth getting right at the same time — see AI Search / GEO Checker and Featured Snippet Optimizer for the related pieces of the same technical foundation.

If you want to check this on your own site right now, Readability & Word Counter runs directly in your browser, free, with no account required.

Try Readability & Word Counter yourself

Everything in this guide runs directly in your browser — no signup, no install.

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More on content readability
Readability & Word Counter vs. Doing It by Hand: Is It Worth Switching?
A practical look at what Readability & Word Counter actually saves you over doing content readability manually, and when manual still makes sense.
The Content Readability Checklist: What to Verify Before You Publish
A short, practical checklist for content readability — the things worth checking every time, not just the first time.
Content Readability FAQ: Questions People Actually Ask
Straight answers to the questions that come up most often about content readability.
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