How we rate books

When available, Common Sense Media is our primary reference. They provide age ratings from professional reviewers, parent ratings from real parents, and kid ratings from young readers themselves. About 7% of our catalog has direct CSM coverage — mostly well-known titles.

Goodreads provides crowd-sourced ratings and review counts, giving us a sense of how the reading community received each book. About 89% of our catalog has Goodreads data.

We pull subject classifications, recommended age ranges, and genre tags from Open Library and publisher metadata. These tell us whether a book is shelved as Children's, Middle Grade, YA, or Adult — which strongly informs content expectations.

For the thousands of books where CSM doesn't have a review, we use an algorithmic classifier that considers genre signals (grimdark gets rated higher than cozy), age group context (middle grade defaults to PG at most), subject keywords, and CSM anchoring when available.

With 5,000+ titles, our classifications rely on metadata, community data, and algorithms — not individual page-by-page reviews.

A "Hard R" rating isn't a criticism. It's information. A Game of Thrones is a masterpiece and it has graphic content. Both things are true.

Our system is a helpful starting point, not gospel. A book's actual content may surprise you — we always recommend checking multiple sources for titles you're concerned about.