Paste your service-page copy and see exactly what grade level it reads at. You get Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, and SMOG scores instantly, plus a plain verdict on whether homeowners (and AI) can actually follow it.
Paste at least a sentence or two above and your readability scores appear here instantly. Nothing leaves your browser.
Long sentences are the fastest thing to fix. Break these into two and your grade level drops.
Readability is one of a dozen things we tune so homeowners and AI both pick you. Get a free mockup or audit and see your copy in plain, persuasive language.
Get a free mockup or audit →Most local service websites are written like a brochure for other contractors, not for the busy homeowner who is two minutes from calling someone else. This checker scores your copy with four standard readability formulas, then translates the number into one plain answer: can a normal customer read this fast and trust it? Paste any page above and find out in real time. Nothing is uploaded, everything runs in your browser.
Flesch Reading Ease runs 0 to 100, and higher is easier (60 to 70 is comfortable plain English). Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level turns that into a U.S. school grade, so a 7 means a 7th grader can follow it. Gunning Fog and the SMOG Index both estimate the years of schooling a reader needs, and they lean harder on long, multi-syllable words. When all four point at the same range, you can trust the read.
Every one of these indices comes down to three things: how many words, how many sentences, and how many syllables. The tool counts your words and sentences directly, then estimates syllables with a vowel-group heuristic (it groups adjacent vowels, trims silent endings like a trailing "e", and applies a few common adjustments). It then plugs those counts into the published Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and SMOG formulas. Syllable counting is an estimate, so treat the grade as a tight range rather than a single exact number.
The average American reads most comfortably at around a 7th to 8th grade level, and people read marketing on their phone even faster and lazier than that. Writing at grade 11 does not make you look smart, it makes you look hard to deal with. Plain copy also helps you in AI search: ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews summarize and quote short, clear sentences far more reliably than dense ones, so the same simplification that converts homeowners also gets you cited.
Hemingway is free for basic highlighting but charges roughly 25 to 30 dollars a month for its AI rewrites. Grammarly gates tone and rewrite suggestions behind Premium. Originality.ai locks readability scoring inside a 14.95 dollar plan. This tool is unlimited, needs no signup, shows you four indices at once instead of one, and adds a homeowner-readability verdict the others do not. It will not rewrite your copy for you, that is the one thing the paid plans add, and it is exactly what our Pro version handles.
The Pro version rewrites your service pages into plain, persuasive, AI-friendly language that homeowners and search engines both prefer.
Get early access, book a free call →Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the tool never fetches a URL. It splits your pasted text into words with a token match, splits sentences on periods, question marks and exclamation points, then estimates syllables with a vowel-group heuristic: it groups adjacent vowels, trims common silent endings such as a trailing "e", treats any word of three letters or fewer as one syllable, and never lets a word fall below one. Words at three syllables or more are tallied separately, because two of the four formulas depend on that count.
Those three totals, words, sentences and syllables, feed the published Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog and SMOG formulas. Fog and SMOG lean on the share of long words. The two Flesch scores lean on syllables per word and words per sentence. The big number at the top is not a fifth formula: it is the average of the three grade-style indices, rounded to a whole grade. Below it, the tool ranks your sentences by word count and shows the three longest, flagging anything past 25 words.
What it cannot tell you matters just as much. Syllable counting is an estimate, so brand names, street names, acronyms and numbers can push the grade a point either way. The formulas were built for running prose, so pasted bullet lists, phone numbers and addresses distort the sentence count. A readability score also says nothing about whether the copy is accurate, persuasive or worth reading: clear and true are separate tests. And it cannot see your live site, your competitors, or how any search or AI engine treats the page. Treat the grade as a narrow range, then read the copy out loud. If you want the writing itself worked on rather than measured, that is content work.
No. It only reads the text you paste into the box. There is no crawler, it never fetches a URL, and it does not see your HTML, headings or page structure. Copy the visible copy from one page at a time and score that page on its own, since averaging a whole site hides the weak page.
Because the formulas count sentences by punctuation. A bulleted list, an address block or a run of phone numbers reads as one enormous sentence or as several fragments, which swings words per sentence hard. Paste running prose for the cleanest read, and check list-heavy sections separately by eye.