Score My
README
Paste a GitHub repo. See whether your README gets a developer from “landed here” to “first success” — or whether it's a 4,000-word manual they'll never read. Scored for adoption, not tidiness. We score the page and the clichés, never you.
By Daria Dovzhikova · Updated June 2026
No signup for the score. Scored for adoption, not tidiness.
A README is a landing page, not a manual
Every README linter grades for completeness — license, contributing guide, table of contents, badges. That checklist produces the exact thing that kills adoption: the 4,000-word README nobody reads, with badge soup where the value prop should be. A developer decides in ten seconds whether to try your tool, and they decide before they scroll. So this scores for conversion, not completeness. The 9 levers, weighted by how much each one moves a developer from landing to first success:
- Value prop in the first 3 lines (heaviest — time-to-first-success is the adoption metric)
- Runnable 60-second quickstart (heaviest — time-to-first-success is the adoption metric)
- Visible output / demo (gif, screenshot, result) (heaviest — time-to-first-success is the adoption metric)
- Single copy-paste install block
- Clear what/why before how
- Clear next step / call to action
- Absence of wall-of-text
- Scannability (headers, short blocks)
- Credibility that matters (not badge soup)
Built by GTM Labs. The score is a directional read of the README's conversion structure, not a code or docs review. More on developer marketing.
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