Yoast's passive voice check: the 10 percent limit, explained

How Yoast spots a passive sentence

A passive sentence puts the thing acted on first and the actor later, or leaves the actor out: "The plugin was installed by the admin", or just "The plugin was installed." Yoast detects these with language-specific rules, which is why the check only appears for languages Yoast has adapted it to.

The result counts sentences, not individual passive verbs, and shows the share: for example, "18% of the sentences contain passive voice, which is more than the recommended maximum of 10%." Clicking the eye icon beside the check highlights the sentences it counted, so you can review them one by one.

Pattern-based detection is not perfect. A form of "to be" followed by a past participle is sometimes a description rather than an action, as in "The shop is closed on Sundays", and a rule may still count it. Review the highlighted sentences before rewriting anything.

Style guides against the passive

The advice is a staple of English writing guides. George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" included the rule "Never use the passive where you can use the active," and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style tells writers to use the active voice. Plain-language guidance for government writing says much the same.

Yoast's own reasoning, from its explanation of how the readability analysis was built, is that passive voice makes writing feel distant and active voice is more engaging, while accepting that some sentences become awkward in the active. That is where the 10 percent allowance comes from: the goal is fewer passive sentences, not none.

When the passive is the right choice

Keep a passive sentence when the actor is unknown, obvious or unimportant, or when the thing acted on is the real subject:

• Unknown actor: "The original files were lost in a server migration."
• The object matters more: "Passwords are hashed before they are stored." Readers care about their passwords, not the function that hashes them.
• History and facts: "The bridge was completed in 1932."
• Process and method descriptions: "Samples were stored at four degrees" is standard in scientific writing.

Technical documentation, security pages, legal text and lab reports will often run above 10 percent for good reasons. An orange or red light on those pages is not a problem to fix.

Rewriting to the active voice

When a passive sentence hides who is responsible or makes the reader work, find the actor and put it first:

Two patterns come up often in how-to content. Instructions written as "X should be done" read better as a direct command. And statements about your own product read better with "we" as the actor, which also makes it clear who is making the promise.

Active sentences also tend to be shorter, which helps the sentence length check at the same time.

Passive sentences that already name the actor, such as "The draft was reviewed by the editor", are the easiest to fix, because the actor is right there to move to the front: "The editor reviewed the draft."

Voice and Hydrogen SEO

Hydrogen SEO does not check for passive voice. The readability part of its SEO score measures only average sentence length. Because passive constructions usually add words ("was reviewed by the team" against "the team reviewed"), rewriting them tends to lower the average and nudge that part of the score up, but the grammar itself is left to you.