Your message is already being decoded. Signal tells you how.
A behavioral read of what your message is doing in a buyer's mind before they consciously decide anything. Where it holds them, where it loses them, and which part to fix first. Send it words, or send it a page, and it reads what is actually there.
A real read on real copy. Every number on this page is an example, not your score.
Most messaging is built by the people who already know what it means.
Signal was built on a different premise. The only perspective that decides anything is the one happening in the buyer's mind, and it happens before they have consciously decided to engage. That perspective is the one you cannot reach from inside the business, and trying harder to imagine it makes the projection worse.1,2
Signal gives you that perspective, on the copy you are about to ship, before it is in front of anyone.
Send it words, or send it the whole page.
It is one read either way. What changes is how much of the message it can see, and a page says a great deal before anyone reaches the words.
A piece of copy
A homepage hero, a landing page, an email, a headline set, a section of a deck. Send it as a visitor meets it and you get the overall signal, the four dimensions underneath it, and the reason each one landed where it did.
The design as well
Attach the layout, a screenshot, or the PDF and the read runs twice: once on the words alone, once on what a visitor actually sees. The gap between the two is what the design is doing to your message.
Four things that happen before someone decides.
Every message passes through the same four filters on its way to a decision. Miss one and the message breaks in a way the sender never sees. Signal shows you which one broke, and what it is costing you.
Clarity Curve
Before the brain decides whether it agrees with you, it decides whether you are worth decoding.
When a message asks for more effort than a reader has to give, even fractionally, the read stops. Not consciously. They do not notice they have stopped, and they will never tell you. They simply move on.
Neuroscience Alignment
Clarity is whether they can follow you. Alignment is whether they want to.
Understanding a message and being moved by it are two separate events. A message can be perfectly clear and completely inert. That is the most expensive failure on this page, because nothing about it looks wrong.
Perception Gap
You wrote what you meant. They read what they expected.
Every reader arrives with a model already running, built from experience and expectation. It is not passive. It fills the gaps you left and overrides the signals that do not fit, which is why saying nothing is never neutral.
Mental Model Alignment
Every buyer arrives mid-decision. Your message either continues the thought they are having or interrupts it.
Decisions start long before anyone reaches your page. People arrive exploring, comparing, under time pressure, or looking for something that confirms who they are. The right message in the wrong mode creates friction nobody can name.
The four are not separate scores. They are the order a message travels in.
Clarity first, then feeling, then perception, then the fit with the decision already forming. Reading all four together is what tells you which one to fix, and fixing the right one first is usually the whole difference.
One submission. A read you can act on the same day.
An overall behavioral signal, the four dimensions underneath it, and a plain language account of what your message is doing and what it is not. Delivered as a formatted document you can put in front of your team or your client without rewriting it first.
An overall behavioral signal, not a writing grade. It reflects how the message is likely to be processed, not how polished it is. Small differences still mean real friction, which is why the four underneath it matter.
See what the design
is costing you.
The same four dimensions, twice. Where the second number is lower, the layout is spending attention the copy then has to earn back. That gap is the number worth taking into the room, because it turns a matter of taste into a measurement.
| Clarity Curve | Copy alone 58 / 100 | With design 52 / 100 | -6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neuroscience | Copy alone 64 / 100 | With design 61 / 100 | -3 |
| Perception Gap | Copy alone 2 / 5 | With design 2 / 5 | ±0 |
| Mental Model | Copy alone 3 / 5 | With design 2 / 5 | -1 |
The first five seconds, written down.
A second by second account of what someone resolves on arrival, naming the elements that did it. It is the part people forward to their designer, because it says what to look at rather than how to feel about it.
Choose a moment
The eye lands on the dark navy field and reads weight before it reads words. Nothing has been said yet, and the page already feels like effort. The reader braces.
It drops to the headline and finds a promise with no problem attached. There is nothing to hang the promise on, so it slides off. The eye goes looking for the reason and does not find one above the fold.
It has reached the price before it has reached the reason. Every argument the page makes from here has to work uphill, against a decision the reader has already started making.
Signal shows you the score. Compass rebuilds the message.
A read tells you where the message loses people. Compass identifies the decision mode your audience is running and rebuilds your communication architecture from that point outward. It does not need a rewrite. It needs a reorder.
Explore Compass ›The rewrite, and the read that proves it worked.
Compass rewrites the message and runs Signal again on the rewrite, so the lift you are shown is a measurement rather than a promise.
- Full Signal scoring on every page in scope, included
- The decision mode your audience is actually in
- A Recognition-First Rewrite, reader first
- The rewrite scored, so the lift is measured
Know how it lands before it does.
Bring one page your team already argues about. We run the read together, walk through why each dimension came out where it did, and you keep it either way. If Compass is the right next step we will say so, and if it is not we will say that too.
- Hattula, Herzog, Dahl, Reinecke (2015). Managerial empathy facilitates egocentric predictions of consumer preferences. Journal of Consumer Research.
- Herzog, Hattula, Dahl (2021). Marketers project personal preferences onto consumers. Journal of Marketing Research.