Hook generator & validator

Write a hook that earns the next three seconds.

Where does it go?

Judged by AI against real copywriting principles — takes a few seconds.

Paste your hook, pick where it runs, and score it.

Good to know

What a hook actually has to do

A hook is the opening line that decides whether anyone consumes the rest — the first three seconds of a short video, the line before “see more” on a post, the first sentence of an article. It has one job: buy attention for the next beat. Everything else about your content is irrelevant if the hook doesn't land, which is why it deserves more revision than the rest of the piece combined.

The curiosity gap, and where it turns into bait

The strongest hooks open a loop the reader needs closed — they name something you don't know yet and withhold it. The failure mode is withholding so much that the hook says nothing at all: “This changed everything” has a gap but no substance. A real curiosity gap tells you enough to make you care about the missing piece, and the content actually closes it.

Negation and the pattern interrupt

Most content agrees with what the audience already believes, so disagreement is inherently interesting. Telling someone to stop doing something, denying a common assumption, or opening on the opposite of what they expect all break the scroll pattern — the reader has to stop and resolve the contradiction. This is the single highest-leverage move for short-form video, where you have no time to build.

Punchiness is a constraint, not a style

Every word before the interesting part is a word the audience can leave on. “So I wanted to talk a bit about how I managed to…” has spent four seconds saying nothing. Front-load the payoff, cut the throat-clearing, and let the specifics do the work. How tight it needs to be depends entirely on placement, which is why the score reweights when you switch channels.

Specific beats clever

A number, a name, or a concrete moment outperforms a clever abstraction almost every time, because specificity signals that there's something real behind the hook. “I cut our AWS bill by 60% in a weekend” promises more than “How to save money on cloud costs” — same subject, but one sounds like it was earned and the other sounds like it was generated.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a good hook score?

A strong score (70+) opens a real curiosity gap, lands fast without throat-clearing, uses a concrete detail rather than an abstraction, interrupts the expected pattern, speaks to a specific person, and promises only what the content can actually deliver.

Why does the score change when I switch platform?

Each placement weights the six dimensions differently. A short video hook lives or dies on punchiness and pattern interrupt; a YouTube opener leans on promising a payoff worth the runtime; an article intro has room to build a curiosity gap. Same hook, different job.

How is this different from a hook template list?

Templates give you a blank to fill in and the result reads like it. This writes hooks about your actual topic, and tags each one with the technique it uses — curiosity gap, negation, specific number, and so on — so you learn the move rather than collecting fill-in-the-blanks.

Can I score a hook it generated for me?

Yes. Every generated hook has a “Score this one” button that runs it through the validator, so you can compare variants on the same six dimensions before you commit to one.

How long can my hook be?

Up to 300 characters, though a real hook is almost always far shorter — the limit exists to leave room for a longer spoken opener or an article lede.

Do you store the hooks I test?

Your hook is sent to Claude to generate the analysis and is not stored afterward. Free, no sign-up.

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