Brands over time

Intercom
over time

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

204 of Intercom's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 64 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
204
Years covered
2015–26
Archived before ChatGPT
64
Blog · press
187 · 17

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Intercom's homepage from 2017 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.

2026intercom.com1 Jul 2026
Intercom homepage, 1 Jul 2026

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

Homepage

2026

“The only helpdesk designed for the AI Agent era”

Page title

Intercom | The only helpdesk designed for the AI Agent era

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2017Communicating with customers shouldn’t be this hard
  2. 2019Come for our chat. Stay for our everything else.
  3. 2020Great customer relationships start here
  4. 2022Build customers for life, with the Engagement OS
  5. 2023Automate conversations with the power of AI
  6. 2026The only helpdesk designed for the AI Agent era

10 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
13.2
14.4
13.6
15.4
12.8
15.9
15.9
15.8
16.0
16.2
15.5
13.8
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20155 pp
20169 pp
20177 pp
20188 pp
20196 pp
202014 pp
202114 pp
202213 pp
202343 pp
202428 pp
202510 pp
202635 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201513.25
201614.49
201713.67
201815.48
201912.86
202015.914
202115.914
202215.813
202316.043
202416.228
202515.510
202613.835

Years with pages: 2015 (5), 2016 (9), 2017 (7), 2018 (8), 2019 (6), 2020 (14), 2021 (14), 2022 (13), 2023 (43), 2024 (28), 2025 (10), 2026 (35). 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 47 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 73 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 · 47 pp2024 to 2026 · 73 ppChange
Sentence length
15.514.9−4%
Sentence rhythm
0.710.57−20%
Contractions
21.911.8−46%
"You"
45%75%+29 pts
"We"
44%23%−21 pts
Questions
4.22.5−39%
Exclamations
0.360.03−92%
Long words
26%34%+8 pts
Em dashes
4.441.79−60%
AI-associated words
2.223.47+56%
AI-era marketing words
1.973.13+59%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
1.573.22+105%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.400.58+45%
Page length
2,2862,264−1%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (47 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (73 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

Intercom 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. Sentence length

    14% more than its sector

    15.2 against a sector average of 13.3; 3rd highest of 16.

  2. Em dashes

    12% less than its sector

    2.67 against a sector average of 3.04; mid-table, 9th of 16.

  3. Contractions

    11% more than its sector

    17.0 against a sector average of 15.4; 5th highest of 16.

Sentence length3rd highest of 16
Intercom 15.2
10.415.7
Contractions5th highest of 16
Intercom 17.0
8.519.6
"You"Mid-table, 8th of 16
Intercom 64%
39%78%
"We"Mid-table, 10th of 16
Intercom 30%
12%49%
Questions5th highest of 16
Intercom 3.3
1.65.1
Long wordsMid-table, 7th of 16
Intercom 31%
23%34%
Em dashesMid-table, 9th of 16
Intercom 2.67
0.216.56
AI-associated words2nd highest of 16
Intercom 3.08
1.033.27
Exclamations2nd lowest of 16
Intercom 0.18
0.155.13
Page length3rd highest of 16
Intercom 2,285
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 Intercom 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.

customer202.3 vs 25.0
support131.5 vs 17.0
service77.7 vs 10.7
resolution33.2 vs 1.0
desk22.7 vs 1.2
ticket19.9 vs 1.3
conversations27.7 vs 3.9
chatbots16.8 vs 0.6
queries15.5 vs 0.9
self-service13.3 vs 0.5
conversational13.3 vs 1.1
helpdesk11.7 vs 0.1
IntercomSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 204 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.

201627 Jan · Blog
“Uber isn’t just killing the taxi industry. Its relentless approach to distribution and scale is also putting a nail in the coffin of app stores.”
The end of app stores as we know them
20239 Feb · Blog
“A great customer experience is about meeting people where they already are, and our comprehensive live chat guide is here to help you do just that.”
A Complete Guide To Live Chat Support

07 · Every page

All 204 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 204 count towards the measures. Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

202635 pages
202510 pages
202428 pages
202343 pages
202213 pages
202114 pages
202014 pages
20196 pages
20188 pages
20177 pages
20169 pages
20155 pages
In the overall numbers, no year12 pages

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Intercom'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?.