Understanding Readability

The Readability panel shows how easy your article is to read, and points at what's making it harder. It updates as you write, works on every plan, and doesn't use AI or AI credits.

Understanding the Readability Panel

1. Head to Articles and open an article in the editor.
2. Click the issues count at the bottom of the editor.
3. A panel opens and shows your article's level (Difficult, Tricky, or Easy). You need at least 100 words to see one.
   
4. You'll get suggestions to improve your readability score. In the Block editor, each issue's underlined in your article. Click one in the panel to jump straight to it.
   
5. Once resolved, the suggestion will 🌬️ poof away.

How the Reading Level Works

We use LIX, a standard readability formula that works across most languages. It looks at two things:

• Sentence length: the average number of words in a sentence.
• Long words: the share of words longer than six letters.

Add them together and you get a score, where lower is easier. We turn that into one of three levels:

A few things to know:

• You'll see a level once your article has at least 100 words. Below that, one sentence can swing it too much.
• Headings, code, and tables aren't counted.
• Words in bold or links still count toward sentence length, but never as long words. They're usually button labels and product names, which you can't shorten.

What Gets Flagged

When the Level and the Issues Don't Match

The reading level and the list of issues measure different things. The level is an average across the whole article. The issues are specific lines that go over a limit.

So the two won't always agree:

• Tricky or Difficult with no issues: nothing crosses a limit on its own, but it adds up. Lots of sentences just under 25 words can pull the level down. So can lots of long words. Neither needs a flag. The panel tells you which of the two it is.
• Easy with issues: one long sentence or a wordy phrase doesn't move the average much, but it's still worth fixing.
  

These checks are deliberately simple, so they only catch what fits a clear rule. For suggestions that look at the whole article, like what's missing, how it's structured, and whether it matches your style guide, use Improve with AI.

Multilingual Articles

If you use multilingual, each translation is checked on its own, in its own language. Sentences and words are split the way that language writes them, so the counts hold up in languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi too.

We'll flag long sentences, long paragraphs, and missing headings in every language. Passive voice and wordy words are English only, so a translation won't get told to change a word that's right in its own language.