What Reading Level Should a Blog Post Be? A Grade-Level Guide by Content Type

You ran your draft through Yoast or Hemingway, and it came back red. “Too hard to read.” Aim for 8th grade, it says. Except your post is about API rate limiting, or prior authorization denials, or indemnification clauses — and dragging it down to 8th grade either guts the accuracy or makes you sound like you’re explaining it to a child.

Here’s the short version: 8th grade is a fine default, not a rule. The right target depends entirely on what you’re writing and who’s already reading it. Below is a grade-level breakdown by content type, backed by the actual studies behind these numbers — including one finding that upends the “always go lower” advice you’ve probably read three times already today.

In this guide:

Why there’s no single correct reading level, and what the data on rankings actually shows
What Flesch-Kincaid really measures (and where it lies to you — I tested this myself)
The literacy baseline everyone cites, and why it’s outdated
Grade-level targets by content type, with sources
When to ignore the 8th-grade rule on purpose
How to find your actual number instead of guessing
Which tools are worth using, and where they mislead you

There’s no universal “best” reading level

Most advice on this topic assumes a lower score is always a win. It isn’t, and there’s data to prove it.

Portent ran readability scores against ranking position for 756,297 pieces of ranking content and found no meaningful relationship between a page’s grade level and where it ranks. If Google rewarded simpler writing, the top results would cluster at a low grade level. They don’t. A separate, peer-reviewed analysis of top-20 Google results across nearly 24,000 queries in 20 topic categories found something more useful than “readability doesn’t matter”: it found that readability among top-ranked pages varies by topic, with health content and institutional sources scoring measurably harder to read than categories like games or home content. In other words, the search results themselves already sort by topic-appropriate complexity. Nobody’s forcing a mortgage-rate explainer down to the reading level of a recipe blog, and Google isn’t rewarding the ones that try.

This tracks with what Google’s own John Mueller has said directly: “We don’t explicitly check things like the reading level.” Readability isn’t a ranking signal. It’s a user signal — it affects whether someone actually finishes your page, links to it, or bounces — and that’s a real reason to care about it. It’s just not the reason most content guidelines claim.

So if your B2B security post scores a 10 and a competitor’s lifestyle post scores a 6, that’s not a problem to fix. That’s two different jobs.

What the score actually measures — and where it lies to you

Flesch-Kincaid and its cousins (Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau) all run on the same two inputs: how long your sentences are, and how many syllables are in your words. That’s it. No comprehension, no context, no sense of whether a word is common or obscure to your specific reader — just syllable-counting dressed up as a grade level.

I tested this on two versions of the same idea, holding the content constant and changing only the vocabulary:

“Our platform orchestrates idempotent, multi-tenant workflows across a distributed infrastructure, enabling enterprises to operationalize their data pipelines without provisioning additional compute resources.” — Flesch-Kincaid grade: 25.2

Same idea, said plainly: “Our platform runs your workflows across many customers at once, safely, even if a step repeats. It works on infrastructure spread across many servers. This lets companies run their data pipelines without buying more computing power.” — Flesch-Kincaid grade: 9.1

Sixteen grade levels, same information. Then I ran a smaller test — one sentence, same structure, only the vocabulary swapped: “reduces inflammation” scored a 13.7; “reduces swelling” scored a 10.4. Same sentence. Same length. One word did that.

That cuts both ways. It means you can often drop several grade levels just by swapping jargon for plain synonyms — genuinely useful. But it also means a high score doesn’t automatically mean bad writing, and a low score doesn’t automatically mean clear writing. A score is a proxy for complexity, not a verdict on quality. Treat it as a diagnostic, not a gate.

The baseline everyone cites is out of date

Nearly every article on this topic — including several ranking for this exact keyword — cites a 2003 literacy study to justify the “average adult reads at an 8th-grade level” line. That data is old enough to vote.

The most recent numbers, from the 2023 PIAAC adult skills assessment, show something worse: the average U.S. literacy score dropped from 271 in 2017 to 258 in 2023, and the share of adults scoring at the lowest literacy level rose from 19% to 28% over that same period. That’s not a stable baseline you can set once and forget — it’s moved measurably in six years, in the wrong direction. If you’re benchmarking against “the average reader,” that average reader is currently less literate than the 8th-grade folklore assumes, not more.

This matters if your audience skews general-consumer. It matters much less if you’re writing for engineers, clinicians, or in-house counsel — which is exactly why one number can’t cover every blog.

Grade-level targets by content type

This is the part the other guides skip. Here’s what the actual research supports, by category:

Table: Reading-level benchmarks by content type

Content type	Target grade level	Why	Source
General / lifestyle / how-to blogs	6th–8th	Matches the literacy range of a broad consumer audience; matches usability research on general web pages	Nielsen Norman Group
Health & patient education	6th–8th (target)	AMA, NIH, and CDC guidance for public health writing	JAMA Network Open, 2020
B2B, SaaS, thought leadership	9th–11th	Professional, time-pressed readers — not academic, but not lay either	NN/g “domain expert” guidance
Legal & compliance (consumer summaries)	8th–11th, sometimes state-mandated	Some regulators cap it directly	Texas Plain Language Law
Technical / developer docs	10th–12th	Necessary jargon for an expert audience, capped before it turns unreadable	NN/g domain-expert ceiling
Academic / research-adjacent	College level (13+)	Audience already holds the domain vocabulary; forcing it down loses precision	Editorial judgment, not a formula

A few of these deserve more than a table cell.

Health is the category everyone gets wrong on purpose. The recommendation has been consistent for years — the AMA, NIH, and CDC all say public health information should be written at or below an 8th-grade level — and health organizations routinely miss their own target. A widely cited 2020 study evaluated 18 government and public health websites’ COVID-19 information and found every single one exceeded the recommended 6th-to-8th-grade range, with the CDC’s own pages averaging an 11th-grade reading level. More recently, a 2024 health-literacy fact sheet noted more than half of U.S. adults have limited reading skills, yet most health materials are still written at or above a 10th-grade level. If the CDC can’t hit its own number, don’t beat yourself up over a Yoast red light — but don’t use that as an excuse to ignore the target either. Health content is the one category where the gap between “recommended” and “actual” has a real cost.

B2B and technical content gets punished by generic advice. Nielsen Norman Group’s own research distinguishes between audiences: write to a 6th-grade level for homepages and critical landing pages, and no higher than 8th grade for general pages — but that guidance was written for broad consumer sites. Their later research on writing for domain experts draws the line differently: general-audience content shouldn’t exceed a 9th-grade level, while content for an expert or professional audience can run as high as 12th grade without becoming a usability problem. If you’re writing developer docs or a security whitepaper and someone hands you an 8th-grade target lifted from a general-audience checklist, that’s the wrong checklist.

Legal content has a real ceiling problem, and it’s measured. A Michigan Bar Journal analysis of contract corpora found standard contract language averages a Flesch-Kincaid grade of 19 — roughly the reading level expected of someone with a law degree — versus a grade of 9 for everyday written English. That gap is why some states have stepped in directly: Texas’s Plain Language Law requires auto finance contracts to be written no higher than an 11th-grade reading level. If your blog is summarizing legal or financial documents for consumers, target the summary at 8th–11th grade even when the underlying document you’re explaining sits at grade 19. That’s the whole point of the blog post existing.

When to ignore the 8th-grade rule on purpose

Most advice here is wrong for anyone writing outside general consumer content, and it’s worth saying plainly: if you’re writing for engineers, doctors, or lawyers, artificially lowering your grade level doesn’t make your content more trustworthy — it makes it read like it wasn’t written by someone who understands the subject.

Stellar Content’s writer makes a fair point that most of the field ignores: brands that turn “8th grade” from a guideline into a hard boundary end up wasting editorial time hunting for synonyms instead of writing well. A 10th-grade piece that’s accurate, specific, and well-organized will outperform an 8th-grade piece that’s been sanded down until it says nothing. Trying to force technical content that naturally sits at grade 10 down to grade 8 isn’t simplification — it’s often just vagueness with better PR.

This doesn’t hold if you’re writing for a genuinely broad, low-literacy, or non-native-English audience, or if you’re under a regulatory reading-level cap like the Texas example above. In those cases, the lower number isn’t a style preference — it’s the actual requirement, and no amount of “but my content is nuanced” changes that.

How to find your actual target — not a guess

Skip the single number. Do this instead:

Pull grade-level scores from the top 5–10 ranking pages for your keyword. This tells you what’s already working for this specific query, not for “content” in general.
Check your own analytics for where readers already drop off. A high exit rate on your most jargon-heavy paragraphs is a stronger signal than any formula.
Match your score to your funnel stage, not just your topic. Top-of-funnel explainers can run simpler; a comparison page aimed at someone already evaluating vendors can run higher, because that reader has already opted into complexity.
Test with an actual reader from your audience, not a colleague who already knows the subject. Score numbers don’t catch confusion the way a real person reading out loud does.

Tools worth using — and their blind spots

Hemingway App highlights hard sentences and passive voice in real time, but it scores by mechanics alone — it will flag “arrhythmia” as hard and “erroneous” as hard with equal weight, even though one is a necessary clinical term and the other is a lazy word choice with a simpler substitute.

Yoast SEO is convenient inside WordPress but uses the same syllable-counting logic — a green light means “short sentences,” not “clear.”

Microsoft Word’s readability stats give you the number with zero explanation of why, which is fine for a quick check and useless for editing.

None of them know your reader. Use them to catch outliers — a 40-word sentence that snuck in, a wall of unbroken jargon — not to chase a number for its own sake.

The takeaway

Stop asking what reading level a blog post should be, and start asking what reading level this blog post should be. A general how-to lands at 6th–8th grade. A SaaS explainer or technical doc reasonably runs 9th–12th. A legal or health summary should land low even when the source material doesn’t. None of that is negotiable through a formula — it’s a decision about your specific reader, made before you open Hemingway, not after.

Next time a score comes back red, don’t reach for the thesaurus first. Pull up the top-ranking pages for that exact keyword, score them, and see where they actually sit. Match that number — or beat it — instead of chasing 8th grade for content that was never meant to hit it.

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