Score your headline for length, word balance, and emotional pull — instantly, no email signup required.
Type or paste a headline and watch three numbers move: characters, words, and a score built from length, word balance and emotional pull. The checklist under the score names what the headline has and what it is missing, so you can see which part of the score you lost rather than guessing.
Write the headline first and analyze it second. Editing toward the score produces headlines that read like they were written for a tool, which is exactly what readers skip.
The default headline on the page is How to Save Money on Your Next Car Purchase. It runs 43 characters and 9 words.
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| Length | Comfortable for a search result and a social card |
| Words | 9, inside the range where a headline still reads as a sentence |
| Power words | None on the tool's list |
| Emotional words | None on the tool's list |
The headline is clear, specific, and dull by the tool's measures. That is worth sitting with: swapping Save Money for Slash would raise the score and lower the clarity. The score rewards pull; a good editor decides how much pull the piece can honestly support.
The word list the score uses is a fixed set of common marketing words — free, proven, simple, ultimate and similar — plus a set that signals feeling. A headline that contains one scores higher than an identical headline that does not. That is a proxy for a real effect, not a measurement of it, and the proxy is easy to game.
Length tells you where the headline will be cut. Search results truncate by pixel width rather than character count, so a headline full of wide letters is cut sooner than the number suggests. Social cards are more generous but still cut. Aim to have the whole point inside the first handful of words, so that a truncated version still means something.
The most useful thing the page does is show you the count. Most weak headlines are weak because they are doing two jobs: naming the topic and promising a benefit. If the checklist shows no emotional word and a long character count, the likely fix is to cut the topic and trust the context around the headline to carry it.
No. The score measures a handful of features that correlate with clicks. A headline can score well and still be inaccurate, which is a worse outcome than being dull.
Short enough that the point survives truncation. Six to twelve words covers most cases; the character count matters more than the word count because it decides where the cut happens.
They set an expectation the reader can check. A number is also a promise about length or content, which makes the piece feel finite and therefore worth starting.
No. It counts characters and words and scans for words on two lists. Read it yourself.
Always. A headline that oversells costs you the reader at the first paragraph and teaches them to skip you next time.
The scoring list is original to this page. It is not an industry standard and it should not be cited as one.
Last updated: November 2, 2026. Reviewed by David Liu.