Podscore
The caption rubric
Podscore grades an Instagram caption out of 100 against five fixed components. The rules are hard and opinionated on purpose — a rubric you can argue with is more useful than a score you cannot check.
Why 70 and not 100. Four of the five components are deterministic rules that run fine in a browser. The fifth — Hook & Keywords, worth 30 points — needs a language model to judge whether an opening line actually earns attention. Rather than guess at it and report a number that looks like the real thing, this page withholds it and says so.
Every deduction rule
Hook & Keywords
30 pointsNeeds the model — not graded on this page
- 0–10 for a boring opener with no keywords.
- 11–20 for a good hook that misses the keywords.
- 21–30 for an excellent hook with keywords integrated naturally.
- Never open with "Hey guys".
Structure
25 points- Deduct 5 points for every paragraph longer than 3 lines.
- Deduct 10 points if the whole caption is a single block of text.
Call to action
20 points- 0 for no call to action at all.
- 10 for a weak one — "Thoughts?", "Let me know".
- 20 for a specific one — "Save this for later", "Send this to someone who needs it".
Length & depth
15 points- Under 100 characters must score 0.
- Under 1,200 characters is capped at 5.
- Full marks require 1,200 characters or more.
Hashtag hygiene
10 points- 0 if there are no hashtags.
- 0 if there are more than 5.
- Full marks for exactly 5 niche-specific tags.
- Generic tags such as #love or #viral are penalised.
Podscore runs over your latest 12 posts inside the app, alongside caption version history so you can A/B a rewrite against real engagement. See how PodSwap works.