Brands over time

Co-op
over time

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

183 of Co-op's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2019 to 2022, measured sentence by sentence, 36 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 9 other supermarkets, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
183
Years covered
2019–22
Archived before ChatGPT
36
Blog · press
143 · 40

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Co-op's homepage from 2000 to 2024, 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.

2024coop.co.uk28 Jun 2024
Co-op homepage, 28 Jun 2024

Screenshot of Co-op’s homepage (coop.co.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 28 Jun 2024. © Co-op or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Co-op.

Homepage

2024

“The football done right”

Page title

Co-op: Homepage - Co-op

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2011We're proudly supporting...
  2. 2013Welcome to The Co-operative
  3. 2017You’re making a £9 million difference to local causes
  4. 2020Enjoy a big night in for £5
  5. 2022Grocery delivery and collection
  6. 2024The football done right

22 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
Supermarkets avg 16.0
17.0
13.8
11.6
11.3
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
2017no pages
2018no pages
20192 pp
20205 pp
20217 pp
202223 pp
2023no pages
2024no pages
2025no pages
2026no pages
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201917.02
202013.85
202111.67
202211.323

Years with pages: 2019 (2), 2020 (5), 2021 (7), 2022 (23). 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

Co-op among supermarkets

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"

    246% more than its sector

    58% against a sector average of 17%; highest of 8.

  2. Questions

    241% more than its sector

    3.3 against a sector average of 1.0; highest of 8.

  3. "We"

    59% less than its sector

    31% against a sector average of 77%; lowest of 8.

Sentence length2nd lowest of 8
Co-op 13.8
8.021.2
Contractions2nd highest of 8
Co-op 18.8
8.521.5
"You"Highest of 8
Co-op 58%
5%58%
"We"Lowest of 8
Co-op 31%
31%90%
QuestionsHighest of 8
Co-op 3.3
0.13.3
Long wordsLowest of 8
Co-op 22%
22%33%
Em dashesMid-table, 4th of 8
Co-op 2.13
1.064.20
AI-associated wordsLowest of 8
Co-op 0.44
0.441.85
Exclamations2nd highest of 8
Co-op 0.79
0.141.21
Page length3rd highest of 8
Co-op 796
3363,070

Pages measured: Tesco 104 · Sainsbury's 60 · Asda 11 · Morrisons 67 · Aldi 1 · Lidl 83 · Ocado 73 · Co-op 183 · Iceland 36 · Booths 2. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Co-op 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.

service83.7 vs 8.2
family71.2 vs 4.7
local67.4 vs 11.7
advice53.9 vs 1.7
days43.9 vs 2.7
like54.4 vs 9.1
day62.3 vs 12.6
loved66.3 vs 0.8
people72.3 vs 18.4
feel38.1 vs 3.2
hours37.8 vs 3.0
want42.7 vs 5.9
Co-opSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 183 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.

2020Nov (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“In 2018, when Co-op launched its biggest ever survey into the subject, 18 million people said they felt uncomfortable talking about death and bereavement. The following year, that number dropped to 16.5 million. So, national attitudes to death are changing, but there’s still some way to go, which is why I always encourage people to find ways to get the conversation started.”
Why it's finally OK to talk about death - Co-op Funeralcare

06 · Every page

All 206 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 183 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (22 under 150 words of text, 1 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

202223 pages
20217 pages
20205 pages
20192 pages
In the overall numbers, no year146 pages
Not measured23 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Co-op'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?.