Score your headline before you publish it

The scorer works on one headline at a time: paste it into the box, and it returns a breakdown against the criteria described above, along with three specific suggestions for improving it. The process itself is straightforward, though it is worth knowing what to do with the result once you have it.

Read the breakdown before you touch the wording

The tool does not tell you whether your headline is good. It tells you where it sits against measurable patterns: how many words it uses, whether it leans on a recognised power word, whether the tone stays consistent, how clear the sentence is, and whether it fits the character limits that platforms such as Google Ads or email subject lines actually enforce. Read the whole breakdown before making a change, because the suggestions are ordered by what the tool judges to be the weakest point first, and fixing that one thing sometimes resolves a second issue at the same time.

Apply one suggestion, then run it again

1. Make the single change the tool recommends first.
2. Paste the revised headline back into the box.
3. Score it again before making the next change.

A headline that gains a stronger verb sometimes gains three characters as well, which matters if you are writing for a platform with a hard limit. Rescoring after each change shows you which edit actually moved the score and which one you would have made anyway out of habit.

The scorer counts patterns. It does not know your product, your audience, or whether the claim in your headline is true, and it can score a headline well that still says the wrong thing to the people you are writing for. Treat the result as a starting point for your own judgement. For the reasoning behind each criterion, the guide to the headline scorer goes through it in more detail.