Brands over time

HubSpot
over time

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

190 of HubSpot's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2017 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 28 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
190
Years covered
2017–26
Archived before ChatGPT
28
Blog · press
125 · 65

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

HubSpot's homepage from 2005 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.

2026hubspot.com1 Jul 2026
HubSpot homepage, 1 Jul 2026

Screenshot of HubSpot’s homepage (hubspot.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 1 Jul 2026. © HubSpot or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by HubSpot.

Homepage

2026

“Where go-to-marketteams go to - grow - scale - close - retain - grow”

Page title

HubSpot | Software & Tools for your Business - Homepage

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2007Grade Your Website
  2. 2012HubSpot All-in-One Marketing Software
  3. 2015Grow your leads
  4. 2017The HubSpot Growth Stack
  5. 2022Powerful, not overpowering
  6. 2026Where go-to-marketteams go to - grow - scale - close - retain - grow

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.
8
16
24
Software avg 13.3
6.4
6.5
11.1
12.4
13.2
15.1
16.2
13.3
19.7
11.1
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
20171 pp
20181 pp
201911 pp
20206 pp
20219 pp
20221 pp
20231 pp
202437 pp
20252 pp
20264 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
20176.41
20186.51
201911.111
202012.46
202113.29
202215.11
202316.21
202413.337
202519.72
202611.14

Years with pages: 2017 (1), 2018 (1), 2019 (11), 2020 (6), 2021 (9), 2022 (1), 2023 (1), 2024 (37), 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 27 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 43 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 · 27 pp2024 to 2026 · 43 ppChange
Sentence length
12.213.4+9%
Sentence rhythm
0.640.71+11%
Contractions
14.914.6−3%
"You"
35%53%+19 pts
"We"
61%36%−25 pts
Questions
2.12.8+39%
Exclamations
2.604.26+64%
Long words
36%32%−4 pts
Em dashes
0.812.04+152%
AI-associated words
1.091.29+19%
AI-era marketing words
0.820.77−6%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
1.681.11−34%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.000.35–
Page length
461893+94%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (27 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (43 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

HubSpot 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. Em dashes

    44% less than its sector

    1.71 against a sector average of 3.04; 2nd lowest of 16.

  2. "We"

    20% more than its sector

    39% against a sector average of 32%; 4th highest of 16.

  3. Long words

    15% more than its sector

    34% against a sector average of 29%; highest of 16.

Sentence length4th lowest of 16
HubSpot 12.4
10.415.7
Contractions5th lowest of 16
HubSpot 13.6
8.519.6
"You"4th lowest of 16
HubSpot 54%
39%78%
"We"4th highest of 16
HubSpot 39%
12%49%
Questions6th lowest of 16
HubSpot 2.8
1.65.1
Long wordsHighest of 16
HubSpot 34%
23%34%
Em dashes2nd lowest of 16
HubSpot 1.71
0.216.56
AI-associated words4th lowest of 16
HubSpot 1.35
1.033.27
Exclamations2nd highest of 16
HubSpot 4.19
0.155.13
Page lengthLowest of 16
HubSpot 740
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.

05 · Vocabulary

Words HubSpot 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.

marketing187.8 vs 34.5
inbound52.1 vs 0.6
download58.1 vs 3.3
keyword29.5 vs 0.6
templates56.2 vs 10.5
seo20.9 vs 1.5
startups16.9 vs 0.8
awards13.1 vs 0.5
social43.5 vs 10.7
announces9.5 vs 0.3
HubSpotSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 190 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.

20171 Sep · AnnouncementArchived copy
“We’re excited to announce today that we’re launching the HubSpot for Startups Series A program. In addition to receiving access to HubSpot’s world-class education resources, Series A startups will also receive executive mentorship and a 50% scholarship on HubSpot marketing and sales software.”
HubSpot Introduces New Program to Help Series A Startups Grow Faster
20212 Mar · Announcement
“When our co-founder Dharmesh Shah unveiled the Customer Code during his keynote at INBOUND 2018, we made a commitment to ourselves, and to our customers, to live up to the tenets we outlined. An important piece of fulfilling that commitment is ensuring that we’re consistently gathering, and acting on, feedback from our customers.”
HubSpot Announces 2021 Customer Advisory Board Members

07 · Every page

All 236 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 190 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (3 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 34 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose, 9 under 150 words of text). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20264 pages
20252 pages
202437 pages
20231 page
20221 page
20219 pages
20206 pages
201911 pages
20181 page
20171 page
In the overall numbers, no year117 pages
Not measured46 pages

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

HubSpot'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?.