What is passive voice?
In an active sentence the subject does the action: "The team wrote the report." In a passive sentence the subject receives the action: "The report was written by the team." The person or thing doing it moves to the end, or disappears altogether: "The report was written."
Passive voice is built from a form of "to be" (is, was, were, has been, will be) or sometimes "get", followed by a past participle such as written, found or shared.
How to identify passive voice
A quick test: add "by zombies" after the verb. If the sentence still makes grammatical sense, it's passive. "The figures were corrected by zombies" works, so it's passive. "Our editor reviewed by zombies" doesn't, so it's active.
- Look for is, are, was, were, be, been or being followed by a past participle
- Check whether the subject is doing the action or receiving it
- Watch for "by" phrases that name the real actor
- Notice sentences where nobody seems responsible for what happened
How to change passive voice to active
Most passives can be rewritten in three moves.
- 1Find who or what performed the action
- 2Make them the subject of the sentence
- 3Put the verb in the active form and drop "by": "Mistakes were found by reviewers" becomes "Reviewers found mistakes"
When passive voice is the right choice
Passive voice is correct grammar and sometimes the better option. Use it when the actor is unknown ("The office was broken into overnight"), unimportant ("The road was resurfaced in May"), or obvious, and when you want to keep the focus on the thing acted on.
Scientific and legal writing use passive deliberately for this reason. The aim isn't to remove every passive sentence. It's to make sure each one is a choice.
How much passive voice is too much?
There's no official limit. A common guideline for web and marketing writing is to keep passive voice under about 10% of sentences, the threshold the Yoast SEO plugin uses for its check. Formal and academic writing often runs higher, and that can be fine.
Use the percentage as a prompt to look, not a score to hit. Five passive sentences in a row is a stronger signal than any single number.
Does passive voice affect SEO?
Not directly. Google doesn't measure passive voice or use it as a ranking factor. It matters because active sentences are usually shorter and clearer, which helps readers find their answer quickly.
For the wider picture of how easy your text is to read, run it through the Readability Checker too.
Why the checker sometimes gets it wrong
Detection follows the grammatical pattern, a form of "to be" plus a past participle, and that same pattern can describe a state rather than an action. "The shop is closed" is usually an adjective describing the shop, not a passive verb. Common adjectives like interested, tired and based are already skipped.
It can also miss passives without a "to be" verb, such as "Having been told, she left." Treat the highlights as suggestions to review.