The honest answer: Google has never said "we rank easier content higher." John Mueller and Gary Illyes have both pushed back on this in the last five years. But if you study top-ranked pages, they skew easy.
A 2023 Backlinko analysis of 11.8M pages found the average Flesch Reading Ease of page-1 results was 76.5 — "easy." Page-1 content also had shorter average sentence length (13.5 words) than deeper results.
Why the correlation without causation?
1. Dwell time. Harder content loses readers faster. Google measures engagement indirectly. 2. AI Overviews and featured snippets pull short, declarative sentences. "A compound interest calculator lets you…" wins over "Compound interest calculators are tools that enable users to…" 3. Voice search. Alexa and Google Assistant read aloud. They prefer 8th-grade copy. 4. LLM-based ranking signals. Since Google's BERT update and the 2024 SGE rollout, ranking models understand semantic clarity — not just keyword match.
Practical advice: target Flesch Reading Ease 60–70 for general content. Push to 75+ for landing pages. Let technical docs sit at 50–55, since jargon is what your audience expects.
Don't fake it. Don't chop every sentence in half and replace every word — you'll score 85 and read like a children's book, which bounces serious audiences. Write for humans first, then trim.
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