Brands over time

itsu
over time

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

129 of itsu's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, measured sentence by sentence. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 9 other food and drink brands, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
129
Years covered
–
Archived before ChatGPT
0
Blog · press
129 · 0

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

itsu's homepage from 2006 to 2023, 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.

2023itsu.com28 Jun 2023
itsu homepage, 28 Jun 2023

Screenshot of itsu’s homepage (itsu.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 28 Jun 2023. © itsu or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by itsu.

Homepage

2023

“itsu eat beautiful”

Page title

itsu: sushi, salads, soups & more. quality ingredients.

Open on the Internet Archive

13 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.

Years with pages: . 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

itsu among food and drink brands

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

    52% less than its sector

    0.95 against a sector average of 1.97; 3rd lowest of 7.

  2. "You"

    30% more than its sector

    62% against a sector average of 48%; 2nd highest of 7.

  3. "We"

    29% less than its sector

    33% against a sector average of 47%; 2nd lowest of 7.

Sentence length3rd highest of 7
itsu 13.4
8.420.8
Contractions3rd lowest of 7
itsu 18.9
8.746.8
"You"2nd highest of 7
itsu 62%
10%63%
"We"2nd lowest of 7
itsu 33%
29%87%
Questions3rd highest of 7
itsu 2.7
0.89.0
Long wordsMid-table, 4th of 7
itsu 21%
16%29%
Em dashes3rd lowest of 7
itsu 0.95
0.394.05
AI-associated words3rd highest of 7
itsu 0.78
0.181.61
Exclamations3rd lowest of 7
itsu 0.89
0.389.76
Page length2nd highest of 7
itsu 619
3311,158

Pages measured: innocent 54 · Pret A Manger 5 · Greggs 63 · Nando's 184 · LEON 0 · wagamama 0 · itsu 129 · COOK 168 · GAIL's 15 · Deliciously Ella 133. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

04 · Vocabulary

Words itsu 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.

noodles145.7 vs 5.2
ramen117.6 vs 3.9
quick114.8 vs 15.1
noodle104.6 vs 3.3
bowl94.5 vs 12.1
miso81.0 vs 5.5
time144.7 vs 37.9
soup71.2 vs 5.7
button72.0 vs 3.7
healthy85.6 vs 13.9
prep70.0 vs 2.5
serves68.0 vs 2.7
itsuSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 129 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.

20224 May · Blog
“Do you have a deep longing for a new and unfamiliar Asian sauce in which to dip your sushi, glaze your gyoza or slosh over your stir-fry? Then you’ve come to right place. We have gladly dived into the research and listed a few favourites below. But first, a brief and supremely saucy history of the ultimate Asian sauce; soy.”
soy sauce & the sorcery of alternative Asian dips
20224 May · Blog
“Do you have a deep longing for a new and unfamiliar Asian sauce in which to dip your sushi, glaze your gyoza or slosh over your stir-fry? Then you’ve come to right place. We have gladly dived into the research and listed a few favourites below. But first, a brief and supremely saucy history of the ultimate Asian sauce; soy.”
soy sauce & the sorcery of alternative Asian dips

06 · Every page

All 130 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 129 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (1 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

In the overall numbers, no year129 pages
Not measured1 page

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

itsu'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?.