What is Readability?
Readability measures how easy your content is to read for both humans and machines. It looks at sentence length, paragraph density, vocabulary difficulty, voice (active vs. passive), and overall sentence structure. The clearer your writing, the more likely a human stays on the page ā and the more likely an AI engine extracts your paragraph as a citation.
In AI search, readability is no longer a soft UX metric. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews scan your content paragraph by paragraph and decide in milliseconds whether to cite it. Dense walls of jargon get skipped. Short, plain sentences get pulled into answers. Readability is one of the Content Quality signals tracked by your GEO-Score.