Readability Scores Across Industries: Who Writes for Humans?
The web is full of content that nobody can read. Not because people are illiterate — because websites are written at the wrong level. Medical sites use graduate-level prose for patients seeking symptoms. Government pages bury critical information in bureaucratic language. And an entire category of modern websites scores zero because their "content" is invisible to anyone (or anything) that can't run JavaScript.
We used LLMSE's readability analyzer to measure 55,805 URLs using the Flesch Reading Ease formula, then did a deep dive into 27 major websites across 10 industries. The results reveal which sectors write for their audience — and which ones don't.
How Readability Scoring Works
LLMSE's readability analyzer strips navigation, headers, footers, scripts, and styles from the HTML, then measures the remaining visible text using the Flesch Reading Ease formula. The score ranges from 0 (extremely difficult) to 100 (extremely easy):
| Grade | Flesch Score | Reading Level | Typical Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 60-100 | 6th-8th grade | Web content, marketing, consumer-facing |
| B | 50-59 | Some high school | General audience, light technical |
| C | 30-49 | College level | Professional, academic, technical |
| D | 10-29 | Graduate level | Academic journals, legal, medical |
| F | 0-9 | Professional | Dense technical, or too little text |
For web content, A is the target. Nielsen Norman Group research consistently shows that web content should be written at an 8th-grade reading level or below. Users scan, they don't read — and simpler prose gets scanned more effectively.
A score of 0 typically means one of two things: the text is extraordinarily dense (30+ grade level), or the page has almost no extractable text content (client-side rendered apps, image-heavy pages, or login walls).
The Big Picture: 55,805 URLs
Our aggregate readability data across all analyzed URLs:
| Grade | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| A (60-100) | 12,399 | 22.2% |
| B (50-59) | 7,691 | 13.8% |
| C (30-49) | 16,106 | 28.9% |
| D (10-29) | 7,696 | 13.8% |
| F (0-9) | 11,913 | 21.3% |
Only 36.0% of websites pass with an A or B grade. The largest single group — 28.9% — scores C, meaning college-level difficulty. And 21.3% score F, indicating content that's either incomprehensibly dense or functionally empty of readable text.
The median website writes at college level. That's a problem when your audience is the general public.
27 Major Websites: The Full Scorecard
We analyzed the homepages of 27 major websites across 10 industries. Three sites (Amazon, TripAdvisor, Realtor.com) returned insufficient text for scoring and are excluded.
| Rank | Site | Score | Grade | FK Grade | Words | Industry |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walmart | 71.7 | A | 6.4 | 366 | E-commerce |
| 2 | Chase | 71.1 | A | 5.8 | 78 | Finance |
| 3 | PayPal | 58.2 | B | 8.3 | 293 | Finance |
| 4 | Bank of America | 57.1 | B | 10.8 | 687 | Finance |
| 5 | NYTimes | 53.6 | B | 10.7 | 1,249 | News & Media |
| 6 | Stack Overflow | 50.3 | B | 10.4 | 1,422 | Technology |
| 7 | GitHub | 47.2 | C | 10.8 | 837 | Technology |
| 8 | Microsoft | 46.0 | C | 11.1 | 444 | Technology |
| 9 | Target | 43.9 | C | 12.3 | 335 | E-commerce |
| 10 | IRS | 41.7 | C | 13.4 | 648 | Government |
| 11 | GOV.UK | 41.6 | C | 12.5 | 564 | Government |
| 12 | Harvard | 37.6 | C | 14.1 | 958 | Education |
| 13 | BBC | 36.2 | C | 16.1 | 2,025 | News & Media |
| 14 | Forbes | 28.3 | D | 18.8 | 1,606 | News & Media |
| 15 | Coursera | 23.8 | D | 15.8 | 1,044 | Education |
| 16 | Wikipedia | 22.3 | D | 23.0 | 155 | Education |
| 17 | Airbnb | 20.6 | D | 23.6 | 53 | Travel |
| 18 | CDC | 20.2 | D | 19.0 | 344 | Government |
| 19 | Redfin | 18.9 | D | 22.4 | 2,181 | Real Estate |
| 20 | WebMD | 13.1 | D | 21.8 | 709 | Healthcare |
| 21 | Healthline | 10.4 | D | 22.9 | 1,025 | Healthcare |
| 22 | WHO | 0.0 | F | 30.0 | 592 | Healthcare |
| 23 | 0.0 | F | 27.3 | 226 | Social | |
| 24 | IMDb | 0.0 | F | 30.0 | 364 | Social |
| 25 | Spotify | 0.0 | F | 30.0 | 244 | Social |
| 26 | Zillow | 0.0 | F | 30.0 | 714 | Real Estate |
| 27 | Booking.com | 0.0 | F | — | 0 | Travel |
FK Grade is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level — the U.S. school grade needed to understand the text. Chase's homepage (5.8) reads at a 6th-grade level. The WHO's (30.0) reads at a post-doctoral level.
Grade distribution: 2 A's, 4 B's, 7 C's, 8 D's, 6 F's. Only 6 of 27 sites (22%) pass with an A or B.
Industry Rankings
Averaging across our sample sites:
| Rank | Industry | Avg Score | Avg Grade | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Finance | 62.1 | A | Chase, Bank of America, PayPal |
| 2 | E-commerce | 57.8 | B | Walmart, Target |
| 3 | Technology | 47.8 | C | GitHub, Stack Overflow, Microsoft |
| 4 | News & Media | 39.4 | C | NYTimes, BBC, Forbes |
| 5 | Government | 34.5 | C | GOV.UK, IRS, CDC |
| 6 | Education | 27.9 | D | Harvard, Coursera, Wikipedia |
| 7 | Healthcare | 7.8 | F | Healthline, WebMD, WHO |
| 8 | Travel | 6.9 | F | Booking.com, Airbnb |
| 9 | Real Estate | 6.3 | F | Zillow, Redfin |
| 10 | Social & Entertainment | 0.0 | F | Reddit, IMDb, Spotify |
The spread is enormous: Finance averages 62.1 (A grade) while Social & Entertainment averages 0.0 (F grade). That's the entire scoring range captured in a single table.
Why Finance Wins
Finance sites write the simplest prose on the web. This is not an accident — it's regulation.
Chase (71.1, A) and PayPal (58.2, B) use short sentences, common words, and direct language. Financial services are required by consumer protection regulations to communicate clearly. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) mandates plain-language disclosures. The SEC requires mutual fund prospectuses to be written in "plain English."
The result: an industry forced by law to write simply actually writes simply. Bank of America (57.1, B) at a 10.8 grade level is the "hardest" finance site — and it still outperforms most other industries.
Finance also benefits from short homepage copy (Chase has just 78 words). Less text means fewer opportunities for complexity.
The Client-Side Rendering Problem
Six sites scored exactly 0.0 — Reddit, IMDb, Spotify, Zillow, Booking.com, and WHO. The first five share a common cause: client-side rendering.
These sites deliver a minimal HTML shell and load their actual content via JavaScript. When LLMSE's analyzer strips scripts and reads the remaining HTML, there's almost no text to analyze. Booking.com's homepage had literally 0 extractable words after stripping navigation.
This isn't just a measurement limitation — it's a real accessibility and SEO problem. Search engine crawlers, screen readers, RSS readers, and AI content extractors all face the same issue: if your content requires JavaScript to appear, you've excluded a significant portion of your potential audience.
WHO (0.0, F) scores zero for a different reason: its 592 words of static text are so dense — a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 30.0 — that the Flesch Reading Ease formula produces a zero. This is genuinely difficult prose, not a rendering issue.
Healthcare: Dense by Design
Healthcare sites consistently score poorly — not because they fail at writing, but because medical content is inherently complex. Healthline (10.4, D) and WebMD (13.1, D) both write at a 22+ grade level despite their stated mission of making health information accessible.
The challenge is real: medical terminology is unavoidable when discussing conditions, treatments, and medications. But the data suggests these sites haven't found the right balance. The CDC (20.2, D at 19th-grade level) faces the same tension between accuracy and accessibility.
For comparison, the UK's GOV.UK (41.6, C) manages to discuss complex government topics at a 12.5 grade level — demonstrating that bureaucratic content can be simplified when there's institutional commitment to plain language.
Education: Not as Readable as Expected
Education sites average 27.9 (D grade) — worse than Government and News. Harvard (37.6, C) is the most readable of the three, but Wikipedia (22.3, D) and Coursera (23.8, D) both write at graduate level.
Wikipedia's low score reflects the encyclopedia's scholarly tone. Articles are written by subject-matter experts who optimize for accuracy and completeness rather than reading ease. At a 23.0 Flesch-Kincaid grade level, the average Wikipedia article requires a graduate degree to parse comfortably.
Coursera's score is a missed opportunity. As an online learning platform targeting a broad audience — including career changers and non-traditional students — writing at a 15.8 grade level creates an unnecessary barrier to engagement.
The Word Count Factor
Readability and word count interact in interesting ways:
| Score Range | Avg Words | Observation |
|---|---|---|
| A (60+) | 222 | Short, punchy, marketing-oriented |
| B (50-59) | 913 | Moderate length, clear writing |
| C (30-49) | 831 | Professional-length, denser prose |
| D (10-29) | 855 | Long-form, complex content |
| F (0-9) | 356 | Either very dense or JS-rendered (little text) |
The highest-scoring sites tend to be the shortest. Chase's A-grade homepage has just 78 words. Walmart's A-grade homepage has 366. When you write less, you write more simply — partly because short copy forces clarity, and partly because homepages with little text are typically marketing pages designed for maximum impact.
The F-grade average of 356 words is misleading: it's pulled down by JS-rendered sites with 0-200 words, while WHO's 592 words of dense prose pulls it up.
Key Takeaways
1. The Web Writes at College Level
The median website in our dataset scores C (30-49), meaning college-level difficulty. For consumer-facing sites, this is 4-6 grade levels too high. The evidence is clear: simpler prose performs better for engagement, comprehension, and conversion.
2. Regulation Drives Readability
Finance — the most regulated consumer-facing industry — writes the most readable content. This is not coincidental. When organizations are required to communicate clearly, they do. The implication: other industries could benefit from adopting similar plain-language standards voluntarily.
3. Client-Side Rendering Creates Content Blind Spots
Six major sites scored 0 because their content is invisible without JavaScript. This affects not just readability measurement but search engine indexing, accessibility, and AI content extraction. Server-side rendering remains important for content discoverability.
4. Healthcare Has the Hardest Challenge
Medical content genuinely requires complex terminology. But the gap between Healthline (10.4) and GOV.UK (41.6) — both discussing technical topics for general audiences — shows there's room for improvement. The UK government's commitment to plain language provides a model.
5. Homepage Readability is a Proxy for Content Strategy
Sites with short, clear homepages (Finance, E-commerce) tend to have intentional content strategies. Sites with long, dense homepages (News, Healthcare) often haven't optimized their entry point for the general audience. The homepage is your first impression — it should be your most readable page.
Methodology
This report analyzed readability metrics for URLs in LLMSE's classification database as of February 25, 2026. Readability was measured using the Flesch Reading Ease formula applied to visible text content after stripping HTML navigation, headers, footers, scripts, and styles.
The 27-site deep dive analyzed homepage content from February 2026. Three sites (Amazon, TripAdvisor, Realtor.com) returned insufficient text for analysis and were excluded. Sites scoring 0.0 are included and discussed — the zero score itself is a meaningful finding.
Limitations: Flesch Reading Ease is calibrated for English prose and may produce unreliable scores for non-English content, tabular data, or code-heavy pages. Homepage content may not represent a site's overall readability. Client-side rendered content is not captured by static HTML analysis.
Check Your Score
Run your site through LLMSE's readability analyzer to see your Flesch Reading Ease score, grade level, and word count. The full audit tool includes readability alongside SEO, EEAT, AEO, WCAG, and GARM analysis in a single scan.
This analysis was conducted using LLMSE, which has classified over 1.4 million websites across SEO, EEAT, WCAG accessibility, readability, and GARM brand safety dimensions. All data reflects the database as of February 2026. To analyze your own site, visit llmse.ai/classify.