Word counter

Reading time, and why it is a length decision

The counter uses 200 words per minute for reading and 130 for speaking aloud — the usual ranges for an adult reading business prose and for a measured delivery. A 1,000-word article is about five minutes. That number matters more than word count as a target, because it is the number a reader feels.

A page that opens with a promise and takes 800 words to deliver it keeps more readers than a 400-word page that never delivers. Length is not the variable; the ratio of promised to delivered is.

How long should a page be

• Meta description — around 155 characters, which is roughly 25 words.
• Title tag — around 60 characters before it is truncated, roughly 9–12 words.
• Social post — 280 characters on X; the first 120 are what people see before expanding.
• Article — long enough to answer the question completely, which for a how-to is usually 900–1,400 words. The posting frequency guide argues the same point from the schedule side.
• Service page — 500–800 words, unless the buying decision genuinely needs more.
• Email — 50–150 words for a pitch, 300–600 for a newsletter issue.

None of these are rules Google publishes. They are the ranges where pages tend to do their job without padding, and padding is the failure mode that matters: an extra 400 words of restatement costs you the reader who was going to convert.

What the repeated-words list is for

It is not a keyword-density target, which is a metric from 2008 that never predicted anything. It is an editing aid. If one word appears eight times in 200 words, the paragraph probably has a repetition problem, and the fix is usually a pronoun, a rewrite, or a cut. Common English words (the, and, of) are excluded so the list is readable.

Use the phrase box for the opposite job: checking that the term you are targeting actually appears, and that it appears naturally rather than in every second sentence.

Questions

Does the counter include the title and headings?

It counts whatever you paste. If you want the article body only, paste the body. Headings and captions count as words if they are in the box.

Why does my word processor give a different number?

Hyphenated words, em dashes and numerals are counted differently by different tools. This one splits on whitespace after normalising dashes, so follow-up is one word and follow — up is three. The difference is usually under 1%, and it matters only when a client has specified an exact count.

Is character count with or without spaces?

Both are shown. Character limits that matter — title tags, meta descriptions, social posts — count spaces, so use the first figure.

Related: readability checker, headline tester, and the pre-publish checklist.