Brands over time

Barnardo's
over time

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

298 of Barnardo's's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2018 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 88 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 9 other charities, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
298
Years covered
2018–26
Archived before ChatGPT
88
Blog · press
166 · 132

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Barnardo's's homepage from 2000 to 2026, 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.

2026barnardos.org.uk1 Jul 2026
Barnardo's homepage, 1 Jul 2026

Screenshot of Barnardo's’s homepage (barnardos.org.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 1 Jul 2026. © Barnardo's or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Barnardo's.

Homepage

2026

“It's time to Call It What It Is”

Page title

Barnardo's | Children's charity | Barnardo's

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2006Barnardo’s Big Toddle
  2. 2010Identify signs of child sexual exploitation
  3. 2012The difference we make every day
  4. 2020Fostering with Barnardo's
  5. 2023No child should be left to cope alone after being exploited.
  6. 2026It's time to Call It What It Is

26 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.
8
16
24
Charities avg 13.4
13.3
14.5
18.1
18.0
17.1
18.3
17.7
17.4
16.8
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
2017no pages
20182 pp
201926 pp
202029 pp
202131 pp
202217 pp
202320 pp
202414 pp
202516 pp
20268 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201813.32
201914.526
202018.129
202118.031
202217.117
202318.320
202417.714
202517.416
202616.88

Years with pages: 2018 (2), 2019 (26), 2020 (29), 2021 (31), 2022 (17), 2023 (20), 2024 (14), 2025 (16), 2026 (8). 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 103 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 38 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 · 103 pp2024 to 2026 · 38 ppChange
Sentence length
17.017.4+2%
Sentence rhythm
0.690.62−9%
Contractions
19.826.4+33%
"You"
34%33%−1 pts
"We"
55%43%−11 pts
Questions
2.02.0+3%
Exclamations
0.930.50−46%
Long words
24%23%−1 pts
Em dashes
1.841.95+6%
AI-associated words
0.690.65−6%
AI-era marketing words
0.360.36−1%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
0.970.47−51%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.450.32−30%
Page length
827829+0%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (103 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (38 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

Barnardo's among charities

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. Contractions

    73% more than its sector

    22.1 against a sector average of 12.7; highest of 9.

  2. Sentence length

    29% more than its sector

    17.3 against a sector average of 13.4; highest of 9.

  3. Em dashes

    21% more than its sector

    2.05 against a sector average of 1.70; 3rd highest of 9.

Sentence lengthHighest of 9
Barnardo's 17.3
10.317.3
ContractionsHighest of 9
Barnardo's 22.1
4.622.1
"You"Mid-table, 4th of 9
Barnardo's 34%
15%49%
"We"Mid-table, 5th of 9
Barnardo's 50%
39%71%
QuestionsMid-table, 6th of 9
Barnardo's 1.8
0.03.8
Long wordsMid-table, 5th of 9
Barnardo's 24%
23%30%
Em dashes3rd highest of 9
Barnardo's 2.05
0.482.90
AI-associated words2nd highest of 9
Barnardo's 0.67
0.040.86
Exclamations2nd highest of 9
Barnardo's 0.70
0.190.88
Page lengthMid-table, 6th of 9
Barnardo's 825
6341,479

Pages measured: Cancer Research UK 133 · Oxfam 201 · British Red Cross 315 · Macmillan Cancer Support 290 · RNLI 35 · NSPCC 174 · Barnardo's 298 · Mind 228 · Save the Children 317 · RSPCA 3. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

05 · Vocabulary

Words Barnardo's 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.

young172.4 vs 21.6
children192.6 vs 96.5
exploitation20.3 vs 1.1
carers23.2 vs 3.3
scotland28.2 vs 5.4
families52.2 vs 18.6
parents32.1 vs 9.8
foster11.4 vs 0.3
school33.0 vs 10.8
lgbt9.4 vs 0.4
child72.1 vs 35.6
family39.4 vs 15.8
Barnardo'sSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 298 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.

20158 Oct · Blog
“LifeSkills is one of the most evaluated prevention and early intervention programmes in the world. It has been proven to be effective in preventing cigarette, alcohol and substance misuse in young people. It is also very cost effective.”
Lifeskills: Evaluation of substance misuse prevention programmes
20192 Jan · BlogArchived copy
“"New year, new you"is the clichéd call to action parroted by marketing for almost anything. It’s enough to induce a perpetual eye roll and frankly, we’re done with it.”
New year, new who?
202118 Oct · Blog
“There's a lot of misconceptions about adoption. So, let's bust some of the most common myths.”
5 Adoption Myths, Busted

07 · Every page

All 303 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 298 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (2 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 2 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose, 1 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20268 pages
202516 pages
202414 pages
202320 pages
202217 pages
202131 pages
202029 pages
201926 pages
20182 pages
In the overall numbers, no year135 pages
Not measured5 pages

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Barnardo's'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?.