Brands over time

Asana
over time

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

223 of Asana's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2016 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 45 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 15 other software companies, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
223
Years covered
2016–26
Archived before ChatGPT
45
Blog · press
174 · 49

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Asana's homepage from 2010 to 2025, closest to 1 July, from the Internet Archive. Pick a year or press play. Each headline is quoted from its capture and links to the archived copy.

2025asana.com30 Jun 2025
Asana homepage, 30 Jun 2025

Screenshot of Asana’s homepage (asana.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 30 Jun 2025. © Asana or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Asana.

Homepage

2025

“Where your teams and AI coordinate work together”

Page title

Manage your team’s work, projects, & tasks online • Asana

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2010What Asana is building (6/8/10)
  2. 2012Learn more about Asana »
  3. 2014Teamwork without email
  4. 2021Work on big ideas, without the busywork.
  5. 2023The best platform for cross-functional work
  6. 2025Where your teams and AI coordinate work together

16 captures. Screenshots are rendered from the archive and can pull in images archived later than the page itself; dates come from the capture. Years without a capture are greyed out in the strip.

02 · Measures by year

How the writing moved

Every year’s pages, averaged. Pick a measure. Hatched bars rest on fewer than 10 pages: context, not a finding. The page count sits under each year.

Sentence lengthAverage words per sentence.
6
12
18
Software avg 13.3
5.8
12.3
11.9
16.2
14.2
12.7
11.2
13.0
11.8
13.1
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
20162 pp
2017no pages
20181 pp
20199 pp
202013 pp
20218 pp
202214 pp
20231 pp
20241 pp
202510 pp
202646 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
20165.82
201812.31
201911.99
202016.213
202114.28
202212.714
202311.21
202413.01
202511.810
202613.146

Years with pages: 2016 (2), 2018 (1), 2019 (9), 2020 (13), 2021 (8), 2022 (14), 2023 (1), 2024 (1), 2025 (10), 2026 (46). Dates come from page metadata, structured data, the URL, or the month a page was first archived (a latest possible date).

03 · Before and after

2019 to Nov 2022 against 2024 to 2026

The same measures on 44 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 57 pages from 2024 on. A change here is a change in style. It does not show how any page was written: people used every one of these words and shapes long before 2022, and SGR-011 found most of the shift across brands was a trend already under way.

Measure2019 to Nov 2022 · 44 pp2024 to 2026 · 57 ppChange
Sentence length
13.912.8−7%
Sentence rhythm
0.650.65−1%
Contractions
17.716.2−8%
"You"
83%79%−4 pts
"We"
14%16%+2 pts
Questions
4.03.8−5%
Exclamations
0.310.80+161%
Long words
27%29%+1 pts
Em dashes
5.764.23−27%
AI-associated words
1.242.43+96%
AI-era marketing words
1.052.19+108%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
1.501.83+22%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.130.16+20%
Page length
1,5331,930+26%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (44 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (57 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

Asana among software companies

Each dot is one brand’s mean across all its measured pages; the tick is the sector average. Only brands with 10 or more measured pages are shown or counted. Select a dot to open that brand.

  1. Em dashes

    36% more than its sector

    4.13 against a sector average of 3.04; 4th highest of 16.

  2. "We"

    34% less than its sector

    21% against a sector average of 32%; 2nd lowest of 16.

  3. Questions

    25% more than its sector

    3.8 against a sector average of 3.1; 3rd highest of 16.

Sentence lengthMid-table, 10th of 16
Asana 12.8
10.415.7
ContractionsMid-table, 9th of 16
Asana 16.2
8.519.6
"You"2nd highest of 16
Asana 75%
39%78%
"We"2nd lowest of 16
Asana 21%
12%49%
Questions3rd highest of 16
Asana 3.8
1.65.1
Long wordsMid-table, 10th of 16
Asana 28%
23%34%
Em dashes4th highest of 16
Asana 4.13
0.216.56
AI-associated wordsMid-table, 9th of 16
Asana 2.14
1.033.27
ExclamationsMid-table, 9th of 16
Asana 0.76
0.155.13
Page length5th highest of 16
Asana 1,611
7403,377

Pages measured: FreeAgent 266 · GoCardless 217 · Xero 328 · Sage 229 · Intercom 204 · HubSpot 190 · Canva 203 · Figma 222 · ClickUp 203 · Miro 14 · Notion 30 · Slack 270 · Asana 223 · monday.com 266 · Airtable 299 · Mailchimp 258. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

05 · Vocabulary

Words Asana uses more than its peers

The words this brand reaches for more often than the rest of its sector. This is subject matter more than voice.

project160.9 vs 28.1
team156.4 vs 45.9
work152.7 vs 53.1
goals49.8 vs 8.2
resources49.8 vs 10.2
management87.0 vs 32.8
objectives18.0 vs 2.3
stakeholders20.5 vs 3.6
transform15.3 vs 2.0
planning31.7 vs 9.1
timeline17.5 vs 3.7
strategic18.7 vs 4.6
AsanaSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 223 pages. Checked for product names and page furniture.

06 · In its own words

What it sounded like

Openings of real pages, quoted word for word, oldest first. Each links to the page, or to the Internet Archive’s copy when it has gone.

201227 Jun · Announcement
“Email is a 40-year-old technology designed to send electronic letters, yet we rely on it to communicate and coordinate nearly everything about our work. We use it to make requests, ask questions, remind each other what we’re working on, and send documents back and forth in a ping-pong match that never seems to end.”
Announcing Inbox: Asana's Next Step Towards A Post-Email World • Asana
20151 Oct · Announcement
“We are having an exciting week at Asana: not only are we rolling out a completely redesigned product, but we’re also unveiling a new logo and brand identity. All our sites and apps now have a vibrant new look, with the aim of making Asana as beautiful as the teamwork that it enables.”
Teamwork is beautiful: Introducing Asana's new look
2019Jul (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“Whether you’re planning an event, overseeing creative production for a campaign, or coordinating bug fixes, you need a way to plan and track every task that needs to get done to complete your project successfully—in addition to knowing who’s going to do it and when it needs to be finished.”
3 visual project management options: Timeline, kanban, and calendar · Asana

07 · Every page

All 248 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 223 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (6 under 150 words of text, 19 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

202646 pages
202510 pages
20241 page
20231 page
202214 pages
20218 pages
202013 pages
20199 pages
20181 page
20162 pages
In the overall numbers, no year118 pages
Not measured25 pages

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Asana'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?.