How to use it
- 1Choose Landing page for hero headlines and ads, or Blog / SEO title for articles — the length targets and search-fit weighting differ.
- 2Type or paste your headline. The score and checks update as you type.
- 3Work through the numbered fixes, rewriting and watching which checks turn green.
- 4Write three or four versions and compare them. The link in your address bar saves the current one.
Examples
Buzzword soup — 32/100
“The revolutionary AI-powered platform that empowers teams to unlock productivity” passes on length but loses almost all its clarity points to three buzzwords, has no number, and never speaks to the reader. The first fix suggested: replace “revolutionary” with what the product actually does.
Specific and short — 85/100
“Cut SaaS churn 20% in 30 days — without discounts” scores full marks for length, specificity and clarity and fits a search result with room to spare. The only suggestion is to address the reader directly, e.g. “Cut your churn 20%…”.
A blog title that runs long — 47/100
“How We Got Our First 1,000 Users Without Paid Ads: A Step-by-Step Breakdown of Every Channel” is specific and clear, but at 16 words it's about 850 pixels wide — Google will cut it around “A Step-by-St…”. Keep the part before the colon as the title and move the rest to the introduction.
The five checks
Length (25 points). Word count against 4–10 words for landing pages or 6–13 for blog titles; a little outside the range scores 15, far outside scores 5.
Specificity (25). 12 points for containing a number, 5 each for up to three concrete words such as time units, “free”, “without”, “save”, “faster”.
Clarity (25). Starts full; −8 for each buzzword from a list of about 50, −6 for hedges such as “might” or “try to”, −5 for passive voice.
Reader pull (15). 7 points for addressing the reader (“you”, “your”), 4 each for up to two emotional words such as “finally”, “mistake” or “stop”.
Search result fit (10). The title's width is estimated from per-character widths at Google's 20px title size and compared with about 580px; over the limit costs all 10 points for blog titles, 4 for landing pages.
Limitations
- infoRules can't judge whether your promise is one the audience wants. A perfect score on a headline nobody cares about is still a weak headline — test the top two with real visitors.
- infoEnglish only. Word lists and length targets are built for English copy.
- infoPixel width is an estimate from average character widths; Google's exact cut-off varies with the characters used and the device.
Questions people ask
What makes a good landing page headline?
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It says what the visitor gets, for whom, in plain words — ideally with something measurable. “Cut SaaS churn 20% in 30 days” beats “The future of customer retention” because a reader can picture the outcome and decide in a second whether it's for them.
How long should a headline be?
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For a landing page, 4 to 10 words is usually enough; put the detail in the subheadline. For a blog or SEO title, 6 to 13 words, and short enough to fit a Google result — roughly 580 pixels, which is about 55–60 characters of normal text.
Why are buzzwords penalised?
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Words like “revolutionary”, “seamless” and “unlock” appear on so many AI and SaaS sites that readers skip over them, and they don't say what the product does. Replacing one with a concrete verb and object — “send invoices”, “find bugs” — almost always makes a headline clearer.
Is this score the same as CoSchedule's headline analyzer?
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No. It's a different, openly documented set of rules aimed at product and landing-page copy as well as blog titles, and it needs no account. Every point comes from one of five named checks, so you can see exactly why a headline scored as it did.
Should I always add a number?
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Not always — but specificity is the fastest way to make a claim believable. If you don't have a number, name the audience or the result instead: “for Shopify stores”, “without writing SQL”.