Passive Voice Checker
Paste your text and see every passive-voice sentence highlighted inline, with the count and the percentage, so you can rewrite the ones that slow your reader down.
Your text
Your text, with passive sentences highlighted
Passive voice is not wrong, but too much of it makes writing feel vague and heavy: the action happens, yet no one seems to be doing it. This free passive voice checker reads your text, highlights the sentences that look passive, and shows you how many there are and what share of the whole they make up. It is a readability aid, not a grammar verdict, built for writers, SEOs and editors who want prose that reads cleanly and gets found, rather than copy that hides who is doing what.
How to use it
Paste your text
Drop a paragraph, a page or a full draft into the box. The checker scans it instantly and marks the sentences that look passive, with nothing to submit.
Read the highlights
Each flagged sentence is tinted inline so you can see exactly where the passive voice sits, next to a live count and the passive percentage of the text.
Rewrite what matters
Turn the sentences that read heavily into active ones, naming who does the action, then paste the result back to watch the percentage fall.
Why it's useful
See it in context, not as a number
A percentage alone tells you little. Highlighting each passive sentence where it actually sits lets you judge whether it earns its place or should be rewritten, because some passives are the right choice and most are not.
A guide for both English and French
The checker detects passive constructions in English and in French, each with its own rule for the verb and the participle, so the same habit of writing clearly carries across the languages you publish in.
Nothing leaves your browser
The whole scan runs client-side. Your text is never uploaded or stored, so you can check unpublished drafts, client work and confidential copy without signing in.
Why passive voice matters for readability and SEO
What passive voice is, and why it piles up
A sentence is passive when the thing acted on becomes the subject and the actor slips to the end or vanishes entirely: "the report was written by the team" rather than "the team wrote the report", or simply "mistakes were made", where no one owns the mistake at all. The grammar is a form of "to be" followed by a past participle, and it is perfectly correct. The problem is rarely a single passive sentence; it is the drift, where page after page is built from constructions that never say who does anything, until the whole thing reads like a notice rather than a voice.
Passive voice creeps in because it feels formal and safe. It lets a writer describe a process without committing to an actor, which is exactly why it dominates reports, policies and academic prose. On the web, where readers skim and leave, that same quality works against you: it adds words, buries the subject, and makes a sentence take longer to land.
The cost on the page and in search
Readers process active sentences faster. "We shipped the update" is shorter and clearer than "the update was shipped by us", and across a long page those saved words and that restored clarity add up to copy that holds attention. Search engines do not penalise passive voice directly, but they reward the signals it tends to erode: time on page, scroll depth, and the sense that a page answers a question plainly. Clear writing keeps readers, and pages that keep readers are the ones that get found.
There is also a voice argument. A brand that writes in the active voice sounds confident and human; one that leans on the passive sounds like a committee. For content meant to persuade, to rank and to be shared, the active voice almost always does more work with fewer words.
When the passive is the right call
Sometimes the actor is unknown, obvious or beside the point, and the passive is genuinely better: "the servers were upgraded overnight" is fine when who did it does not matter. The goal is never zero passives, it is to catch the ones that hide an actor you should name, and to keep the share low enough that your writing stays direct.
How to read this tool, and where it stops
This checker uses a pattern, not a parser: it looks for a form of "to be" (or "être" in French) followed closely by a past participle, which catches most real passives and will occasionally flag a sentence that only looks like one. Treat every highlight as a prompt to reread, not a verdict. A low percentage with a few deliberate passives is a healthy result; a high one is a sign to go back and name your actors. Use it to build the habit, then trust your ear.
Checking passive voice is one pass over a single piece of text. Doing it consistently across a whole site, in every language you publish in, is a different scale of work, which is where Otorank picks up: it researches, writes, publishes and tracks content built to be found across 150+ languages, so the clarity you tune here by hand becomes the default once you move from editing one page to running the whole channel.
They use Otorank
Questions
How the checker detects passive voice, why it is a guide rather than a rule, and whether passive is ever acceptable.
It looks for a form of "to be" (am, is, are, was, were, be, been, being) followed within a few words by a past participle. In French it looks for a form of "être" followed by a participle. It is a pattern match, so treat each highlight as a prompt to reread rather than a definitive ruling.
No. Passive voice is correct and sometimes the best choice, when the actor is unknown, obvious or irrelevant. The aim is to catch the passives that hide an actor you should name and to keep the overall share low, not to eliminate every one.
There is no universal target, but keeping passive sentences well under a fifth of the text usually reads as direct. Judge the highlights in context rather than chasing a single number.
Not directly. Search engines do not penalise it, but heavy passive voice erodes clarity and the engagement signals that come with it. Clearer writing keeps readers on the page, which is what helps you get found.
No. The scan runs entirely in your browser; nothing is uploaded or stored, so you can check unpublished and confidential drafts safely.