Brands over time

Cancer Research UK
over time

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

133 of Cancer Research UK's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 49 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
133
Years covered
2015–26
Archived before ChatGPT
49
Blog · press
113 · 20

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Cancer Research UK's homepage from 2002 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.

2026cancerresearchuk.org30 Jun 2026
Cancer Research UK homepage, 30 Jun 2026

Screenshot of Cancer Research UK’s homepage (cancerresearchuk.org) as archived by the Internet Archive on 30 Jun 2026. © Cancer Research UK or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Cancer Research UK.

Homepage

2026

“We exist to beat cancer.”

Page title

Cancer Research UK | The world's leading cancer charity

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2006Buy World Cup products
  2. 2009It's not too late to enter Race for Life
  3. 2012Plain packs petition
  4. 2014"I'm so happy that my mum was able to come to my wedding"
  5. 2018ADYAN’S BEATING CANCER RIGHT NOW
  6. 2026We exist to beat cancer.

25 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
Charities avg 13.4
10.1
9.1
10.4
12.6
7.6
10.0
8.8
8.1
13.6
12.6
13.2
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20154 pp
20167 pp
201710 pp
20187 pp
20192 pp
20208 pp
20211 pp
20223 pp
20231 pp
2024no pages
20251 pp
20264 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201510.14
20169.17
201710.410
201812.67
20197.62
202010.08
20218.81
20228.13
202313.61
202512.61
202613.24

Years with pages: 2015 (4), 2016 (7), 2017 (10), 2018 (7), 2019 (2), 2020 (8), 2021 (1), 2022 (3), 2023 (1), 2025 (1), 2026 (4). 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

Cancer Research UK 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. "You"

    50% more than its sector

    49% against a sector average of 33%; highest of 9.

  2. Contractions

    48% less than its sector

    6.7 against a sector average of 12.7; 2nd lowest of 9.

  3. Em dashes

    26% less than its sector

    1.26 against a sector average of 1.70; 3rd lowest of 9.

Sentence lengthLowest of 9
Cancer Research UK 10.3
10.317.3
Contractions2nd lowest of 9
Cancer Research UK 6.7
4.622.1
"You"Highest of 9
Cancer Research UK 49%
15%49%
"We"Mid-table, 6th of 9
Cancer Research UK 44%
39%71%
QuestionsMid-table, 4th of 9
Cancer Research UK 2.4
0.03.8
Long wordsHighest of 9
Cancer Research UK 30%
23%30%
Em dashes3rd lowest of 9
Cancer Research UK 1.26
0.482.90
AI-associated wordsMid-table, 5th of 9
Cancer Research UK 0.63
0.040.86
ExclamationsHighest of 9
Cancer Research UK 0.88
0.190.88
Page lengthHighest of 9
Cancer Research UK 1,479
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.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Cancer Research UK 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.

information131.7 vs 35.0
clinical34.2 vs 2.0
nhs41.5 vs 7.2
cancers27.1 vs 0.5
patients28.6 vs 3.9
trials22.3 vs 0.7
breast22.4 vs 1.8
pain21.5 vs 1.4
forum21.2 vs 1.3
bowel21.2 vs 0.6
patient22.1 vs 2.1
icon17.5 vs 0.8
Cancer Research UKSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 133 pages. Product names and page furniture filtered automatically; list not yet reviewed.

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.

201627 Jul · BlogArchived copy
“The Royal College of General Practice and National Cancer Action Team audit tool for cancer provides a method of identifying and reviewing cancer diagnoses.”
Primary care audit tools and information
2018Apr (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“Want to create your own lifetime risk calculations? Download our lifetime risk template to calculate the lifetime risk for a UK population using the current probability and adjusted for multiple primary (AMP) methods.”
Cancer risk statistics
20202 Jul · BlogArchived copy
“We have created a central resources hub for Health Professionals which hosts all of our CRUK resources and further materials to help with managing the pandemic. We are updating the information as guidance changes. There is also a page specifically for patients on our about cancer hub.”
CRUK GP Community of practice
2021Jan (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“Want to create your own lifetime risk calculations? Download our lifetime risk calculator to calculate the lifetime risk for a UK population using the current probability and adjusted for multiple primary (AMP) methods.”
Cancer risk statistics
202522 Apr · Blog
“Northern Ireland Referral Guidelines for Suspected Cancer(PDF, 386 KB) (NICaN) do not include recommendations for non-specific symptoms.However, there are non-specific symptoms both individually and in combination with other symptoms that warrant site-specific urgent referrals.”
Guidelines and referral pathways in Northern Ireland

06 · Every page

All 148 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 133 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (2 under 150 words of text, 12 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.

20264 pages
20251 page
20231 page
20223 pages
20211 page
20208 pages
20192 pages
20187 pages
201710 pages
20167 pages
20154 pages
In the overall numbers, no year85 pages
Not measured15 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Cancer Research UK'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?.