Web accessibility (WCAG)
Designing and building so people with disabilities can use a site, guided by the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
ContentReading level
Readability
How easily a reader can understand a text, influenced by sentence length, vocabulary, structure and formatting; not a direct ranking factor.
In full
Google has said it does not use readability formulas such as Flesch-Kincaid as a ranking signal, and matching the register your audience expects matters more than a score — technical audiences want precision, not simplicity. Where readability does have measurable effects is engagement, comprehension and extractability: clear structure and unambiguous sentences are easier for both people and machines to summarise correctly. Over-simplifying expert content can reduce its perceived expertise.
Example
A legal explainer keeps precise terminology but adds a short plain-language summary box at the top of each section.
Related terms
Heading structure (H1-H6)
The hierarchy of HTML heading elements that conveys a document's outline to users, assistive technology and parsers.
Featured snippet
A block at or near the top of Google's results that quotes an extracted answer from a page, with a link to the source.
Helpful, reliable, people-first content
Google's stated content standard: content created primarily for people, that demonstrates first-hand expertise and leaves readers feeling…
Semantic chunking
Splitting documents along meaning boundaries — sections, topics, complete ideas — rather than at fixed character counts, to produce…