Industry SEO benchmarks for Google penalty risk scores, E-E-A-T scores, content readability, and AI detection rates. Compare your content against data from top-10 ranking pages across 7 industries — free.
Mixed sources. Some figures on this page are observed from Credify's own scanner; others are directional estimates from manual sampling. Each is labelled below.
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Locate your niche in the Google Penalty Risk table below. YMYL industries — health, finance, and legal — face the strictest Google quality standards and require a penalty risk score below 40 and an E-E-A-T score above 60 to rank competitively.
Get your actual Google penalty risk score and E-E-A-T score using Credify's free scanner. 28 signals checked in under 10 seconds — no signup required. Compare your real scores directly against these SEO benchmarks by industry.
The scanner shows exactly which signals are pulling your Google penalty risk score up. Fixing 3–5 critical signals typically drops your risk by 20–30 points and lifts E-E-A-T score significantly above the industry benchmark.
Google penalty risk scores from Credify's scanner across top-10 ranking pages per niche. A higher score means more gaps in E-E-A-T, technical SEO, and content quality — and a greater chance of being caught by a Google quality update. YMYL industries face stricter standards: a penalty risk score above 50 in health or finance is a serious red flag.
Most content scores below 60 on the E-E-A-T scale — these SEO benchmarks show the industry averages across all four dimensions. An E-E-A-T score above 65 puts you ahead of most competitors. Expertise (Expt) averages just 12/25 across all industries and is typically the easiest gap to close with credential mentions, author bios, and first-hand examples.
Flesch 0 = very difficult, 100 = very easy. These content readability benchmarks show news journalism sets the bar for web writing — grade 9–10, Flesch 58, passive voice at 12%. Marketing and blog content performs best overall. Student essays average 24% passive voice, making passive-voice reduction the single easiest readability improvement for most sites.
AI detection scores below 30% are typically classified as human by leading detectors. These AI detection benchmarks show raw GPT-4 and Claude output scores before and after humanization. Social media and short-form content responds best — brief text allows faster variance injection. Blog and academic content needs more passes to reach the target.
A good E-E-A-T score is above 60/100 — the average across all industries is just 46/100. Scoring above 65 puts you ahead of most competitors. YMYL content (health, finance, legal) typically needs an E-E-A-T score above 60 to rank competitively after Google quality updates.
A Google penalty risk score is a 0–100 measure of how likely a page is to be caught by a Google quality update. Credify's scanner checks 28 signals — including E-E-A-T gaps, missing schema, Core Web Vitals, and technical SEO issues — and returns a risk score. Scores above 50 carry significant ranking risk.
For most web content, a Flesch readability score of 60–70 is ideal (grade 7–9 reading level). Blog posts average 62, marketing pages average 72, and news journalism averages 58. Technical documentation scores 35 or lower, which is too difficult for general web audiences and may hurt engagement metrics.
SEO benchmarks vary significantly by industry. YMYL industries — health, finance, and legal — average 61–64/100 Google penalty risk and E-E-A-T scores of just 38–41/100 due to strict Google quality standards. News and lifestyle content averages E-E-A-T of 52–55/100, benefiting from clear authorship and source citation practices.
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