Brands over time

British Gas
over time

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

199 of British Gas's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 62 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 11 other energy suppliers, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
199
Years covered
2015–26
Archived before ChatGPT
62
Blog · press
186 · 13

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

British Gas'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.

2026britishgas.co.uk6 Jul 2026
British Gas homepage, 6 Jul 2026

Screenshot of British Gas’s homepage (britishgas.co.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 6 Jul 2026. © British Gas or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by British Gas.

Homepage

2026

“Energy prices that can only go down”

Page title

Gas and electricity, boilers and energy efficiency - British Gas

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2008Gas and Electricity
  2. 2013Gas & electricity
  3. 2016Get up to £100 no claims money back
  4. 2020Coronavirus: important information
  5. 20231/2 price electricity every Sunday
  6. 2026Energy prices that can only go down

23 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
Energy avg 14.8
16.4
15.8
17.1
15.4
16.8
13.5
16.2
13.1
14.4
13.4
14.4
14.3
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
201510 pp
20165 pp
201711 pp
20189 pp
20192 pp
20207 pp
20215 pp
20224 pp
20232 pp
20245 pp
20252 pp
20264 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201516.410
201615.85
201717.111
201815.49
201916.82
202013.57
202116.25
202213.14
202314.42
202413.45
202514.42
202614.34

Years with pages: 2015 (10), 2016 (5), 2017 (11), 2018 (9), 2019 (2), 2020 (7), 2021 (5), 2022 (4), 2023 (2), 2024 (5), 2025 (2), 2026 (4). 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 18 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 11 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 · 18 pp2024 to 2026 · 11 ppChange
Sentence length
14.513.9−4%
Sentence rhythm
0.630.60−5%
Contractions
12.612.3−3%
"You"
62%67%+5 pts
"We"
36%32%−4 pts
Questions
6.63.2−52%
Exclamations
0.310.00−100%
Long words
24%26%+2 pts
Em dashes
4.692.06−56%
AI-associated words
1.031.16+12%
AI-era marketing words
0.750.84+12%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
0.792.87+265%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.220.07−66%
Page length
1,0541,050−0%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (18 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (11 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

British Gas among energy suppliers

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. "You"

    32% more than its sector

    67% against a sector average of 51%; 4th highest of 11.

  2. "We"

    31% less than its sector

    29% against a sector average of 42%; 4th lowest of 11.

  3. Questions

    28% more than its sector

    5.0 against a sector average of 3.9; 4th highest of 11.

Sentence lengthMid-table, 6th of 11
British Gas 14.6
13.316.4
ContractionsMid-table, 7th of 11
British Gas 15.5
8.024.4
"You"4th highest of 11
British Gas 67%
28%85%
"We"4th lowest of 11
British Gas 29%
14%65%
Questions4th highest of 11
British Gas 5.0
1.77.1
Long wordsMid-table, 5th of 11
British Gas 24%
19%32%
Em dashesMid-table, 6th of 11
British Gas 2.92
0.157.68
AI-associated words4th lowest of 11
British Gas 0.70
0.552.62
Exclamations2nd lowest of 11
British Gas 0.32
0.001.86
Page lengthMid-table, 6th of 11
British Gas 977
6681,774

Pages measured: ScottishPower 220 · Utilita 70 · Good Energy 290 · Ecotricity 27 · Outfox the Market 0 · Fuse Energy 232 · Octopus Energy 289 · British Gas 199 · EDF 280 · OVO 157 · E.ON Next 132 · So Energy 53. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

05 · Vocabulary

Words British Gas 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.

business130.0 vs 33.4
boiler79.4 vs 21.7
landlord12.3 vs 0.9
mix16.2 vs 2.4
guaranteed11.8 vs 1.0
safety19.6 vs 4.1
cover18.3 vs 4.0
combi11.0 vs 1.5
engineer13.9 vs 2.7
British GasSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 199 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.

201312 Sep · BlogArchived copy
“How many of us think about how much energy single appliances cost to run? Probably not enough of us, but for business owners this could make a real difference to business energy bills.”
How much energy do single appliances in a company waste?
2020 · Blog
“A global pandemic, economic uncertainty and further lockdowns – 2020 had it all. But how exactly have business energy consumption and wholesale prices been affected?”
Business energy insights – what's the future?
20214 Mar · BlogArchived copy
“We’re rolling out smart meters across the UK, as the Government requires every home and business to have a smart meter by June 2025. But what are the benefits of having a smart meter for your business and how do you get one?”
Smart meters for business - how to get your free upgrade
2024 · Blog
“Only half of a customer’s typical energy bill is made up of raw energy and supplier costs. The rest of the bill is made of up of industry charges that fund the maintenance, security and development of the UK’s energy infrastructure. These are essential to delivering energy to businesses.”
Future third party costs

07 · Every page

All 200 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 199 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (1 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20264 pages
20252 pages
20245 pages
20232 pages
20224 pages
20215 pages
20207 pages
20192 pages
20189 pages
201711 pages
20165 pages
201510 pages
In the overall numbers, no year133 pages
Not measured1 page

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

British Gas'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?.