Brands over time

GoCardless
over time

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

217 of GoCardless's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2025, measured sentence by sentence, 65 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 15 other software companies, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
217
Years covered
2015–25
Archived before ChatGPT
65
Blog · press
179 · 38

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

GoCardless's homepage from 2012 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.

2026gocardless.com29 Jun 2026
GoCardless homepage, 29 Jun 2026

Screenshot of GoCardless’s homepage (gocardless.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 29 Jun 2026. © GoCardless or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by GoCardless.

Homepage

2026

“THE EASY WAY TO GET PAID”

Page title

Online Payment Processing Solution | GoCardless

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2012Simple online payments
  2. 2014Stop worrying about online payments
  3. 2015Recurring payments made simple
  4. 2019Get paid on time, every time
  5. 2020Made for recurring payments
  6. 2025THE EASY WAY TO GET PAID

12 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
Software avg 13.3
11.2
13.2
10.8
10.2
9.3
10.0
9.8
9.8
10.9
11.4
15.9
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20153 pp
20163 pp
201710 pp
201810 pp
201916 pp
202017 pp
202133 pp
202215 pp
20235 pp
20243 pp
20253 pp
2026no pages
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201511.23
201613.23
201710.810
201810.210
20199.316
202010.017
20219.833
20229.815
202310.95
202411.43
202515.93

Years with pages: 2015 (3), 2016 (3), 2017 (10), 2018 (10), 2019 (16), 2020 (17), 2021 (33), 2022 (15), 2023 (5), 2024 (3), 2025 (3). 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

GoCardless among software companies

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. Questions

    47% more than its sector

    4.5 against a sector average of 3.1; 2nd highest of 16.

  2. Em dashes

    29% less than its sector

    2.17 against a sector average of 3.04; 4th lowest of 16.

  3. Contractions

    26% less than its sector

    11.4 against a sector average of 15.4; 2nd lowest of 16.

Sentence lengthLowest of 16
GoCardless 10.4
10.415.7
Contractions2nd lowest of 16
GoCardless 11.4
8.519.6
"You"Mid-table, 9th of 16
GoCardless 64%
39%78%
"We"6th highest of 16
GoCardless 35%
12%49%
Questions2nd highest of 16
GoCardless 4.5
1.65.1
Long words4th highest of 16
GoCardless 32%
23%34%
Em dashes4th lowest of 16
GoCardless 2.17
0.216.56
AI-associated words3rd lowest of 16
GoCardless 1.12
1.033.27
Exclamations5th lowest of 16
GoCardless 0.46
0.155.13
Page length3rd lowest of 16
GoCardless 836
7403,377

Pages measured: FreeAgent 266 · GoCardless 217 · Xero 328 · Sage 229 · Intercom 204 · HubSpot 190 · Canva 203 · Figma 222 · ClickUp 203 · Miro 14 · Notion 30 · Slack 270 · Asana 223 · monday.com 266 · Airtable 299 · Mailchimp 258. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

04 · Vocabulary

Words GoCardless 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.

payments235.6 vs 3.3
payment136.1 vs 4.2
recurring51.0 vs 1.8
collect45.2 vs 1.6
direct47.9 vs 2.6
debit53.1 vs 0.3
bank50.3 vs 3.8
banking29.0 vs 0.6
one-off34.8 vs 0.3
integrations48.2 vs 6.0
paid44.8 vs 5.2
api34.1 vs 2.8
GoCardlessSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 217 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.

20189 Apr · BlogArchived copy
“The ultimate guide to getting paid on time for agencies. We guide you through practical, low-cost, high-impact tactics that will reduce your agency's average payment times and debtor days.”
Getting paid on time: Free e-Guide for agencies
2020 · Blog
“We analyzed over 52 million payments from 55,000 GoCardless businesses, to find out everything you need to know about payment failure rates.”
Report
202121 Dec · Blog
“Bacs payments are some of the most common bank-to-bank transfers in the UK. There are two main types you might be familiar with - Direct Debit and Direct Credit.”
Bacs Processing Calendar 2022
20255 Mar · Blog
“LONDON, 6 March 2025 -- A new report from bank payment company GoCardless, commissioned through the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), has revealed late payments are not only a perennial concern for small and medium businesses (SMBs) -- they’re a growing one too.”
GoCardless

06 · Every page

All 233 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 217 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (13 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose, 3 under 150 words of text). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20253 pages
20243 pages
20235 pages
202215 pages
202133 pages
202017 pages
201916 pages
201810 pages
201710 pages
20163 pages
20153 pages
In the overall numbers, no year99 pages
Not measured16 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

GoCardless'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?.