Brands over time

How UK brands write · 2015 – 2026

Brands
over time

Every year keeps its colour across every chart.│ ChatGPT, 30 Nov 2022

172 UK brands and 22,089 of their own blog posts, press releases and announcements, measured sentence by sentence, some back to 2015 through the Internet Archive. Plus 2,942 archived homepages, one a year. See how each brand’s writing has moved, how it compares with its sector, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Brands
172
Pages measured
22,089
Archived pages, 2015–22
5,081
Homepage captures
2,942

02 · Sectors

Side by side, by sector

Banks and building societies18 brands · 2,669 pagesEnergy suppliers12 brands · 1,949 pagesMobile and broadband16 brands · 1,983 pagesSoftware16 brands · 3,422 pagesInsurance10 brands · 2,049 pagesCharities10 brands · 1,994 pagesSupermarkets10 brands · 620 pagesFood and drink10 brands · 751 pagesFashion10 brands · 221 pagesTravel10 brands · 459 pagesDIY and home9 brands · 600 pagesBeauty9 brands · 876 pagesMotoring7 brands · 1,351 pagesHotels and UK holidays10 brands · 1,397 pagesWater companies10 brands · 1,238 pagesHigh street shops5 brands · 510 pages

03 · All brands

Every brand, A to Z

Brands with fewer pages get a shorter read: the numbers are there, flagged where they are thin. The strip shows pages measured per year.

Banks and building societies

Energy suppliers

Mobile and broadband

Software

Insurance

Charities

Supermarkets

Food and drink

Fashion

Travel

DIY and home

Beauty

Motoring

Hotels and UK holidays

Water companies

High street shops

04 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Each brand’s own blog posts, press releases and announcements, fetched from the live site in 2026 and from the Internet Archive for 2015 to November 2022. Homepages are shown as captures; product and help pages are not measured.

The measures

Code counts from ScriptGrain’s writing instruments: sentence length and rhythm, contractions, pronouns, punctuation, long words, and three published lists of AI-associated words. No AI model reads or judges any page.

What it cannot say

These measures describe style. They cannot tell who or what wrote a page, and nothing here says or implies that any brand used AI to write.

Sample sizes

Every number carries its page count. Years under 10 pages, and before-and-after comparisons with under 10 pages on a side, are shown as context only.

Sentence length
Average words per sentence.
Sentence rhythm
How much sentence length varies (standard deviation over mean). Higher reads less even.
Contractions
Contractions (we're, you'll, it's) per 1,000 words. A rough gauge of how conversational the writing is.
"You"
Share of I/we/you pronouns that are "you": how much the writing addresses the reader.
"We"
Share of I/we/you pronouns that are "we": how much the writing talks about the organisation.
Questions
Question marks per 1,000 words.
Exclamations
Exclamation marks per 1,000 words.
Long words
Share of words with seven or more letters.
Em dashes
Em dashes per 1,000 words.
AI-associated words
Words from SGR-007's three AI-associated lists, per 1,000 words. These are style markers that people used long before ChatGPT; a higher rate says nothing about who or what wrote the page.
AI-era marketing words
Marketing words that became more common in AI-era copy (seamless, elevate, unlock...), per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
Quieter LLM-favoured words
Everyday words language models are known to over-use, per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
AI-associated sentence shapes
Sentence patterns such as "not just X, but Y", found by ScriptGrain's cliche checker, per 1,000 words. A style measure only.
Page length
Average words per page.

Studies: SGR-009: Do brands in the same sector sound the same? · SGR-010: How UK brands write · SGR-011: Did brand writing change after ChatGPT?.