How is readability score calculated?

A readability score is a number that tells you how easy or difficult it is to read your text. The idea behind it is that people read at different levels and something that is absolutely readable for a PhD can leave pupils' heads spinning.  A readability score is based on the Flesch-Kincaid test of readability and is available for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Turkish. Semrush will suggest the average of your top ten rivals’ readability scores as the goal for your content’s readability.

We use the Flesch reading-ease score formula, as follows:

The higher the readability score the easier the text is. Scores can be interpreted as shown in the table:

When you create or order some content, you can check the readability score and see if you need to make copy edits to the writing style. The goal should be to have your page easy to read for your target audience. To test your readability score live, download our SEO Writing Assistant from the Google Workspace Marketplace.  

Below the key recommendations, Semrush shows your top ten rivals’ pages and highlights where they use the target keyword in their content. The number of occurrences will also be noted, so you can get an idea of how much density your competitors are having success with.