Why word count still matters
Most places you publish have a limit. Meta descriptions get cut around 155–160 characters, X posts stop at 280, App Store subtitles at 30, Product Hunt taglines at 60. Write to the limit in one place and you stop pasting into five different fields to see what fits.
Length also sets expectations. A launch post that runs 1,800 words reads as a story; one that runs 300 reads as an announcement. Neither is wrong, but you should choose on purpose.
How the counts work
- Words are runs of letters or numbers. Hyphenated words like "well-known" and contractions like "don't" count once.
- Characters count what you see, so an emoji is one character, not the two or four code units some tools report.
- Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by a space. Abbreviations such as "Dr." and "e.g." and initials like "J. R." do not end a sentence.
- Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time uses 238 words a minute, the average for adults reading non-fiction in English from a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Speaking time uses 150 words a minute, a comfortable pace for a talk, podcast or demo video. If you are scripting a 60-second launch video, aim for about 150 words.
Using the keyword list
The top keywords table skips stop words like "the" and "and", so what is left is what your text is actually about. If the list does not match the topic you want to rank for, the copy is drifting. For phrase-level counts and a target keyword check, use the keyword density checker. To see whether the text is easy to read, run it through the readability checker.