Brands over time

Mailchimp
over time

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

258 of Mailchimp's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2025, measured sentence by sentence, 61 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
258
Years covered
2015–25
Archived before ChatGPT
61
Blog · press
149 · 109

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Mailchimp's homepage from 2001 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.

2026mailchimp.com1 Jul 2026
Mailchimp homepage, 1 Jul 2026

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

Homepage

2026

“Email & SMS marketing minus the learning curve”

Page title

Email & SMS Marketing Platform | Mailchimp

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2008or check out our features
  2. 2011App Spotlight: Chimpadeedoo
  3. 2016Send better email. Sell more stuff.
  4. 2019You're ready to grow. Now what?
  5. 2022Grow your audience and your revenue
  6. 2026Email & SMS marketing minus the learning curve

26 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
10.6
18.3
14.9
17.1
17.2
13.2
15.4
16.4
18.9
18.3
18.8
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20155 pp
20161 pp
20178 pp
201811 pp
201911 pp
202010 pp
20219 pp
202216 pp
20234 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
201510.65
201618.31
201714.98
201817.111
201917.211
202013.210
202115.49
202216.416
202318.94
202418.33
202518.83

Years with pages: 2015 (5), 2016 (1), 2017 (8), 2018 (11), 2019 (11), 2020 (10), 2021 (9), 2022 (16), 2023 (4), 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

Mailchimp 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

    36% less than its sector

    2.0 against a sector average of 3.1; 2nd lowest of 16.

  2. Sentence length

    18% more than its sector

    15.7 against a sector average of 13.3; 2nd highest of 16.

  3. Em dashes

    18% less than its sector

    2.49 against a sector average of 3.04; mid-table, 10th of 16.

Sentence length2nd highest of 16
Mailchimp 15.7
10.415.7
ContractionsMid-table, 7th of 16
Mailchimp 16.6
8.519.6
"You"Mid-table, 10th of 16
Mailchimp 62%
39%78%
"We"Mid-table, 8th of 16
Mailchimp 33%
12%49%
Questions2nd lowest of 16
Mailchimp 2.0
1.65.1
Long wordsMid-table, 8th of 16
Mailchimp 30%
23%34%
Em dashesMid-table, 10th of 16
Mailchimp 2.49
0.216.56
AI-associated wordsMid-table, 10th of 16
Mailchimp 2.04
1.033.27
Exclamations6th lowest of 16
Mailchimp 0.51
0.155.13
Page lengthMid-table, 9th of 16
Mailchimp 1,350
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 Mailchimp 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.

audience36.4 vs 4.1
intuit37.1 vs 0.2
sms20.1 vs 0.4
marketing99.0 vs 35.3
quickbooks16.4 vs 0.8
customers76.9 vs 26.2
brand43.9 vs 11.1
domain12.2 vs 0.5
campaigns25.9 vs 4.9
marketers15.3 vs 1.9
products27.4 vs 6.6
e-commerce9.1 vs 0.5
MailchimpSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 258 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.

2017Jan (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“Facebook ad campaigns in MailChimp are an easy way to promote your business, sell your products, and grow your audience. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create effective, scalable Facebook ad campaigns that benefit your business—and your bottom line.”
Defining Your Facebook Advertising Strategy
2018Sep (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“That’s where Mailchimp can help. Our powerful marketing tools make it easy and affordable to connect with your customers—and people like them—across platforms like Instagram, so you can be confident that you’re spending your ad budget wisely and reaching the right people in the right place at the right time.”
Defining Your Instagram Advertising Strategy
2020Mar (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“Instead of focusing on the frequency at which you publish, your focus should be on consistently creating content that helps you achieve your business goals. In this article, we’ll explain how to establish editorial guidelines, create an editorial calendar, and periodically review your progress.”
How to Consistently Write Content for Your Small Business Blog
2022May (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“How your navigation menu is presented to your visitors is critical in helping them learn what you have to offer, as well as focusing on improving the professionalism of your site. Does your navigation bar look like it could use some help? If so, read on.”
Navigation Menu: A Guide to Optimize Website Navigation
2025 · Blog
“These changes might sound cosmetic, but they signal one of Gmail’s biggest reorganizations in years, reshaping how marketing, transactional, and subscription emails are displayed and prioritized in your customers’ inbox.”
Gmail Inbox Updates 2025

06 · Every page

All 265 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 258 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (4 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
20234 pages
202216 pages
20219 pages
202010 pages
201911 pages
201811 pages
20178 pages
20161 page
20155 pages
In the overall numbers, no year177 pages
Not measured7 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Mailchimp'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?.