Brands over time

JD Sports
over time

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

65 of JD Sports's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2020 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 4 other high street retailers, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
65
Years covered
2020–26
Archived before ChatGPT
0
Blog · press
0 · 65

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

JD Sports'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.

2026jdsports.co.uk8 Jul 2026
JD Sports homepage, 8 Jul 2026

Screenshot of JD Sports’s homepage (jdsports.co.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 8 Jul 2026. © JD Sports or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by JD Sports.

Homepage

2026

“Shop By Category”

Page title

JD Sports UK - Forever Forward

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2009FHM GUIDE TO TRAINERS
  2. 2011The best trainers, boots & plimsolls:
  3. 2016Join over 2 million fans
  4. 2017Download our apps
  5. 2023Sale Top Picks
  6. 2025Shop By Category

18 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
Shops avg 12.0
18.2
18.9
12.7
19.9
17.4
18.1
17.9
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
2017no pages
2018no pages
2019no pages
20201 pp
20211 pp
20223 pp
20231 pp
20242 pp
20255 pp
20265 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
202018.21
202118.91
202212.73
202319.91
202417.42
202518.15
202617.95

Years with pages: 2020 (1), 2021 (1), 2022 (3), 2023 (1), 2024 (2), 2025 (5), 2026 (5). 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

JD Sports among high street retailers

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

    93% less than its sector

    0.1 against a sector average of 1.5; lowest of 5.

  2. "You"

    85% less than its sector

    6% against a sector average of 41%; lowest of 5.

  3. Contractions

    48% less than its sector

    6.0 against a sector average of 11.6; lowest of 5.

Sentence length2nd highest of 5
JD Sports 14.7
7.515.2
ContractionsLowest of 5
JD Sports 6.0
6.019.3
"You"Lowest of 5
JD Sports 6%
6%77%
"We"Highest of 5
JD Sports 68%
14%68%
QuestionsLowest of 5
JD Sports 0.1
0.12.9
Long wordsHighest of 5
JD Sports 32%
20%32%
Em dashes2nd highest of 5
JD Sports 2.30
0.733.00
AI-associated wordsMid-table, 3rd of 5
JD Sports 0.28
0.241.34
ExclamationsLowest of 5
JD Sports 0.02
0.023.33
Page length2nd highest of 5
JD Sports 1,408
8891,631

Pages measured: Currys 115 · Hobbycraft 120 · The Works 21 · JD Sports 65 · HMV 189. Measures and method: SGR-010; this sector and its brands were added by Brands over time, measured exactly as the studies measured theirs. Sector averages and ranks cover every brand in the sector on this site.

04 · Vocabulary

Words JD Sports 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.

sales68.7 vs 8.0
cash68.6 vs 11.9
profit44.9 vs 3.4
operating43.6 vs 5.5
financial47.9 vs 7.6
growth43.2 vs 6.7
income30.3 vs 1.1
fashion43.2 vs 0.6
JD SportsSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 65 pages. Checked for product names and page furniture.

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.

202210 Apr · Press
“JD is excited to welcome to the family one of the biggest social media influencers and personalities on the planet, Chunkz, as its Brand Ambassador.”
JD Welcomes Chunkz as Brand Ambassador
202514 Jan · Press
“"In line with our proven long-term approach, we chose not to participate in what was a more promotional environment in the period than we anticipated, fully maintaining our trading discipline to deliver gross margins ahead of last year, clean inventory and strong cash management.”
Robust trading performance in a challenging market
2026 · Press
“The report, titled Growing Our Tomorrow Together, highlights how JD is embedding social impact, sustainability and colleague development across the 51 countries in which it has a presence.”
JD Group publishes 2026 Global Impact Report

06 · Every page

All 101 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 65 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (1 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 35 under 150 words of text). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20265 pages
20255 pages
20242 pages
20231 page
20223 pages
20211 page
20201 page
In the overall numbers, no year47 pages
Not measured36 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

JD Sports'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?.