content legibility

Our AI visibility check tells you whether the crawlers are permitted in. This one tells you whether there is anything to read once they are. A page can pass every robots.txt test and still be a blank document to ChatGPT, because AI crawlers fetch HTML and do not execute JavaScript. If your content is assembled in the browser, they see the empty shell your server sent.

Machine legibility — is the text in the HTML, does it need a click, is the structure sound — has ground truth. Readability is a set of editorial conventions from Yoast’s published thresholds. We report them separately because they fail differently and they are fixed by different people: one is a developer’s job, the other a writer’s. Blending them into a single number would tell you nothing you could act on.

It does not mean the page will rank. Yoast say this plainly about their own analysis and we will repeat it: these are conventions for clear writing, not ranking signals. Passive-voice detection in particular is a heuristic and produces occasional false positives — treat a single flag as a prompt to re-read the sentence, not a verdict on it.

Transition-word density and reading-ease scoring are English-only measures. On Hebrew, Yiddish or any other language they produce confident nonsense, so this check reads the page’s lang attribute and leaves them out rather than showing you a permanent red light for no reason.