Brands over time

Boots
over time

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

46 of Boots's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2023 to 2024, measured sentence by sentence. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 8 other beauty brands, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
46
Years covered
2023–24
Archived before ChatGPT
0
Blog · press
4 · 42

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Boots's homepage from 2001 to 2022, 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.

2022boots.com1 Jul 2022
Boots homepage, 1 Jul 2022

Screenshot of Boots’s homepage (boots.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 1 Jul 2022. © Boots or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Boots.

Homepage

2022

“Select your shipping destination”

Page title

Beauty | Health | Pharmacy and Prescriptions - Boots

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2015Browse by category
  2. 2021Select your shipping destination

6 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.
5
10
15
Beauty avg 11.5
14.8
14.9
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
2017no pages
2018no pages
2019no pages
2020no pages
2021no pages
2022no pages
20231 pp
20241 pp
2025no pages
2026no pages
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
202314.81
202414.91

Years with pages: 2023 (1), 2024 (1). Dates come from page metadata, structured data, the URL, or the month a page was first archived (a latest possible date).

03 · Against its sector

Boots among beauty brands

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. "We"

    53% more than its sector

    48% against a sector average of 31%; 2nd highest of 9.

  2. Sentence length

    35% more than its sector

    15.6 against a sector average of 11.5; highest of 9.

  3. Questions

    29% less than its sector

    2.1 against a sector average of 2.9; 2nd lowest of 9.

Sentence lengthHighest of 9
Boots 15.6
8.315.6
Contractions3rd lowest of 9
Boots 12.1
4.918.6
"You"2nd lowest of 9
Boots 47%
33%75%
"We"2nd highest of 9
Boots 48%
18%60%
Questions2nd lowest of 9
Boots 2.1
1.24.2
Long wordsMid-table, 4th of 9
Boots 27%
22%29%
Em dashes3rd highest of 9
Boots 3.02
0.765.55
AI-associated words2nd highest of 9
Boots 2.45
0.402.51
ExclamationsMid-table, 6th of 9
Boots 0.72
0.053.82
Page length2nd lowest of 9
Boots 762
5225,303

Pages measured: Boots 46 · The Body Shop 75 · Cult Beauty 134 · LOOKFANTASTIC 132 · Space NK 132 · Neal's Yard Remedies 121 · Molton Brown 37 · The INKEY List 100 · Bulldog Skincare 99. Measures and method: SGR-010; this sector and its brands were added by Brands over time, measured exactly as the studies measured theirs. Sector averages and ranks cover every brand in the sector on this site.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Boots 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.

customers82.7 vs 1.9
healthcare58.3 vs 0.5
members60.2 vs 0.4
health88.9 vs 5.2
wellness46.8 vs 1.1
accessible23.4 vs 0.6
pharmacy31.5 vs 0.1
local29.6 vs 1.4
chain20.1 vs 0.3
trusted20.1 vs 0.3
BootsSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 46 pages. Checked for product names and page furniture.

05 · 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.

20131 May · Press
“Warmer days, brighter nights, time in the park and the garden, holidays at home and abroad, and a barbeque whatever the weather - all signs that summer has arrived.”
Boots UK
20185 Jan · Press
“What’s new at Boots? Find out the latest updates from the UK’s largest pharmacy-led health and beauty chain – from new products and services to important business developments.”
Boots UK
202018 Aug · Press
“It’s in the products we use to get ready each morning. It’s in the coffee-to-go cup we purchase during our hectic commute. It’s in the carrier bags we use to pick up our groceries at the end of a busy day. But how many of us stop to think about the impact our daily routine has on the planet?”
Boots UK
202525 Jun · Press
“One of the highlights in the Boots calendar is our annual celebration of the Boots 50 Year Club. This most exclusive club is our opportunity to recognise those incredible team members who’ve dedicated 50 years or more of their to Boots.”
The Boots 50 Year Club

06 · Every page

All 49 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 46 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (3 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20241 page
20231 page
In the overall numbers, no year44 pages
Not measured3 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Boots'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?.