Brands over time

Metro Bank
over time

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

145 of Metro Bank's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 32 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 17 other banks, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
145
Years covered
2015–26
Archived before ChatGPT
32
Blog · press
17 · 128

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Metro Bank's homepage from 2011 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.

2026metrobankonline.co.uk22 Jun 2026
Metro Bank homepage, 22 Jun 2026

Screenshot of Metro Bank’s homepage (metrobankonline.co.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 22 Jun 2026. © Metro Bank or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Metro Bank.

Homepage

2026

“This Feels Different”

Page title

Metro Bank | This is Relationship Banking

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2011Magic Money Machine
  2. 2017Love your bank at last
  3. 2019You're going to love banking with us.
  4. 2022Sun, sea and fee-free
  5. 2024Win Women's International T20 Tickets
  6. 2026This Feels Different

15 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
Banks avg 14.4
19.9
18.4
18.7
18.8
18.8
17.9
18.4
17.7
20.6
16.8
14.1
13.6
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20152 pp
20164 pp
20176 pp
20186 pp
20197 pp
20205 pp
202115 pp
20229 pp
20234 pp
20244 pp
20252 pp
20263 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201519.92
201618.44
201718.76
201818.86
201918.87
202017.95
202118.415
202217.79
202320.64
202416.84
202514.12
202613.63

Years with pages: 2015 (2), 2016 (4), 2017 (6), 2018 (6), 2019 (7), 2020 (5), 2021 (15), 2022 (9), 2023 (4), 2024 (4), 2025 (2), 2026 (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

Metro Bank among banks

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

    80% less than its sector

    0.6 against a sector average of 3.0; lowest of 16.

  2. "We"

    64% more than its sector

    77% against a sector average of 47%; highest of 16.

  3. "You"

    63% less than its sector

    18% against a sector average of 47%; lowest of 16.

Sentence lengthHighest of 16
Metro Bank 18.6
11.818.6
ContractionsMid-table, 10th of 16
Metro Bank 14.2
9.428.7
"You"Lowest of 16
Metro Bank 18%
18%76%
"We"Highest of 16
Metro Bank 77%
19%77%
QuestionsLowest of 16
Metro Bank 0.6
0.65.2
Long words4th highest of 16
Metro Bank 27%
20%30%
Em dashes3rd highest of 16
Metro Bank 3.35
1.263.96
AI-associated words3rd highest of 16
Metro Bank 1.45
0.342.27
ExclamationsMid-table, 8th of 16
Metro Bank 0.23
0.023.75
Page lengthLowest of 16
Metro Bank 526
5261,935

Pages measured: Metro Bank 145 · TSB 170 · Virgin Money 73 · The Co-operative Bank 40 · Chase UK 3 · Zopa 208 · Atom bank 306 · Kroo 67 · Skipton Building Society 107 · Coventry Building Society 2 · Lloyds Bank 210 · Nationwide 91 · Monzo 219 · Barclays 213 · NatWest 292 · Starling Bank 298 · Santander 114 · HSBC 111. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Metro Bank 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.

store71.1 vs 3.6
underlying43.1 vs 1.0
million77.3 vs 9.5
deposits47.4 vs 3.0
december47.0 vs 3.8
ratio30.5 vs 1.6
stores25.4 vs 0.7
bps23.9 vs 0.6
total42.9 vs 4.6
profit30.9 vs 2.6
loss33.6 vs 3.5
colleagues24.3 vs 1.9
Metro BankSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 145 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.

201513 Nov · Press
“Metro Bank’s rapid expansion continues in 2015 with the opening of its 39th store in Newbury. To mark the occasion, the UK’s most revolutionary bank is inviting Newbury residents to join colleagues for its grand opening celebrations taking place on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st November.”
Metro Bank brings the banking revolution to Newbury
20205 May · Press
“The impact of COVID-19 has been, and continues to be, rapidly evolving and difficult to predict with any certainty. An update on the impacts of the pandemic and its economic consequences will be provided at the H1 results.”
First Quarter 2020 Trading Update
20225 Apr · Press
“The tech sector not only represents 7% of total economic output for the UK, but is predicted to grow faster than the UK economy overall by 2027. Just over 19,000 new tech companies were created in 2020 (ONS: 19,425) and Manchester is home to 5,725 tech companies.”
Manchester Named Top UK City for Tech Companies
20238 Jun · Press
“Metro Bank’s Bradford store will be hosting a special breakfast for local businesses around the theme Together We Grow. The event will be held in its Market Street store from 8.30 – 10.30 am on Wednesday June 14th in partnership with financial advisers Hillcrest Wealth Management.”
Bradford Metro Bank Hosts Together We Grow Breakfast for Local Businesses

06 · Every page

All 155 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 145 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (6 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 1 under 150 words of text, 3 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20263 pages
20252 pages
20244 pages
20234 pages
20229 pages
202115 pages
20205 pages
20197 pages
20186 pages
20176 pages
20164 pages
20152 pages
In the overall numbers, no year78 pages
Not measured10 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Metro Bank'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?.