Headline Power-Word Score
Paste a headline, pick the audience, get a score out of 100 with a Killer, Strong, Average or Weak label. The breakdown shows which power words landed, whether the length and format helped or hurt, and what to change to lift the score. Useful for blog titles, email subject lines, listicle hooks and ad copy.
Explain like I'm 5 (what even is this calculator?)
Some words make people want to click. Words like secret, shocking, proven, instant. Some headline shapes work better too: a number at the start, a how-to opener, a question. This tool looks at your headline, counts the bits that work, and gives you a score with a few suggestions for what to add or take out.
Score a headline
Browser-only. Your headline is scored locally. Nothing is uploaded, logged or stored.
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Weak
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Prove it
Score a headline above to see the working out.
What the score is actually measuring
The total of 100 is split across six components. Power words contribute up to 35 points, divided across emotional, curiosity, urgency and value buckets, with a cap on each so a single bucket cannot dominate. Length contributes up to 20, peaking in the six-to-twelve-word band. Sentiment contributes up to 15, rewarding a clear positive or negative tilt over flavourless neutral. Numbers (any digit anywhere in the headline) contribute 10. The common-word ratio penalty contributes up to 10 for headlines that are not stuffed with filler. Format contributes up to 10 for how-to and question framings.
Why the audience selector matters
The same headline reads very differently to a consumer and a B2B buyer. Consumers click harder on emotion and urgency: shocking, instant, today. B2B buyers respond to specificity, numbers, and length, and tend to distrust hyperbolic urgency. The audience selector tilts the weighting accordingly, so a headline aimed at a CTO is not penalised for skipping the screaming urgency vocabulary, and a Facebook hook is not over-rewarded for a polite B2B-flavoured opening. The general setting sits in the middle and is fine for most blog posts.
What a Killer headline tends to look like
Eight to twelve words. A digit near the front. At least two power words pulling on different levers, typically curiosity plus value, or emotion plus urgency. A clear sentiment skew. Often a how-to or question framing. Example: "How to Spot 7 Shocking Mistakes in Your Service Charge". Score that and you will land in Killer territory. Strip the digit and you drop a band. Lengthen it past sixteen words and you drop again. Replace shocking with a neutral word and you lose the sentiment points. The bands are designed to make those trade-offs visible.
Where the tool is deliberately rough
Three places. First, the power-word list is curated, not exhaustive: a synonym you love may not be on it, which is fine. Second, sentiment is detected from a small positive and negative word list, not real sentiment analysis, so sarcasm and irony will fool it. Third, the number bonus fires on any digit, including dates and prices, which usually helps but occasionally over-rewards. Treat the score as a sanity check on a draft, not as ground truth. The right test is still: does it earn the click from the people you actually want?
How to use this in a real workflow
Write three to five headline variants without scoring. Then run each through the tool, look at the breakdown, and pick the variant that earns its score for the right reasons. A headline that scores 75 because it is genuinely sharp beats a headline that scores 80 because you stuffed in an extra power word. The suggestions list points at the weakest component, which is usually a faster fix than rewriting from scratch. If you are testing email subject lines, run the variants past the tool and then A/B-test the top two with a real send. The score predicts patterns; the audience confirms them.
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Frequently asked questions
What counts as a power word?
A power word is a word that does emotional, curiosity, urgency or value work in a headline. Examples: shocking, secret, instant, proven. They are words readers feel before they read, which is why they lift click-through rates on listicles, opinion pieces and email subject lines. The list this tool checks against is roughly 60 staples drawn from copywriting practice. It is not exhaustive: if a word feels like it is doing similar work for your audience, it probably is, even if it is not on the list.
What is the ideal headline length?
Six to twelve words is the band the tool rewards in full. Below six and the headline often feels stubby and underspecified. Above twelve and you start losing readers who skim. The figures behind the band come from listicle and email A/B testing across multiple platforms over the past decade. There is nothing magic about exactly twelve words, so do not chop a clean fourteen-word headline to hit the band. Use it as a nudge, not a rule.
Why does the tool penalise neutral sentiment?
Because flavourless headlines do not earn the click. A reader needs a reason to stop scrolling, and that reason is almost always emotional, positive or negative. A bold negative (Mistakes, Stop, Warning) often beats a polite positive, because surprise and risk pull harder than reassurance. Neutral sits in the middle and gets ignored. The tool flags it so you can pick a side.
Does the score guarantee clicks?
No. The score reflects structural patterns that correlate with engagement, not the truth of your headline or how well it matches the audience you are writing for. A Killer-rated headline that lies about the article will under-perform once readers learn to distrust your by-line. Use the score as a quick sanity check on a draft, then test variants with real readers.