Brands over time

Monzo
over time

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

219 of Monzo's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2024, measured sentence by sentence, 65 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
219
Years covered
2015–24
Archived before ChatGPT
65
Blog · press
189 · 30

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Monzo's homepage from 2016 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.

2026monzo.com1 Jul 2026
Monzo homepage, 1 Jul 2026

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

Homepage

2026

“Monzo for all your money”

Page title

Monzo | Your New Favourite Bank

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2017The bank of the future
  2. 201940,000 people open a Monzo account every week
  3. 2020Banking made easy
  4. 2024Make money easy
  5. 2025Make your money more Monzo
  6. 2026Monzo for all your money

11 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
Banks avg 14.4
14.6
13.9
15.8
13.7
12.9
13.5
14.2
15.6
14.1
17.8
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
201513 pp
201617 pp
201720 pp
201826 pp
201933 pp
202018 pp
202119 pp
202219 pp
20238 pp
20242 pp
2025no pages
2026no pages
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201514.613
201613.917
201715.820
201813.726
201912.933
202013.518
202114.219
202215.619
202314.18
202417.82

Years with pages: 2015 (13), 2016 (17), 2017 (20), 2018 (26), 2019 (33), 2020 (18), 2021 (19), 2022 (19), 2023 (8), 2024 (2). 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

Monzo 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. Contractions

    82% more than its sector

    28.7 against a sector average of 15.8; highest of 16.

  2. Questions

    72% more than its sector

    5.2 against a sector average of 3.0; highest of 16.

  3. Long words

    21% less than its sector

    20% against a sector average of 25%; lowest of 16.

Sentence lengthMid-table, 9th of 16
Monzo 13.9
11.818.6
ContractionsHighest of 16
Monzo 28.7
9.428.7
"You"Mid-table, 7th of 16
Monzo 53%
18%76%
"We"6th lowest of 16
Monzo 41%
19%77%
QuestionsHighest of 16
Monzo 5.2
0.65.2
Long wordsLowest of 16
Monzo 20%
20%30%
Em dashesMid-table, 10th of 16
Monzo 1.95
1.263.96
AI-associated words4th highest of 16
Monzo 1.38
0.342.27
ExclamationsHighest of 16
Monzo 3.75
0.023.75
Page length6th highest of 16
Monzo 997
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 Monzo 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.

features27.4 vs 2.6
work67.6 vs 18.1
pot19.5 vs 1.2
safe31.0 vs 5.0
published25.3 vs 3.2
use86.4 vs 30.5
better43.2 vs 10.4
pots15.6 vs 0.9
gets15.6 vs 0.9
interesting15.4 vs 0.5
virtual16.3 vs 1.2
behaviour14.9 vs 0.9
MonzoSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 219 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.

201515 Dec · Blog
“The second problem is the fees and charges. Even worse than getting screwed on foreign exchange is not knowing for several days how hard I’m being screwed. I come back from holiday and look at my statement, wincing. I just can’t understand how it costs so much.”
Why are foreign card payments such a mess?
20182 Jul · Blog
“So right now we’re building the best bank account we possibly can. One that gives you instant control over your money, helps you budget better, and doesn’t hit you with unfair fees when you spend money abroad or exceed your overdraft limit. We wrap all of that up in a genuinely enjoyable experience, with friendly human help, and a constant feedback loop with our customers so we’re always improving.”
The Monzo mission
201927 Jun · BlogArchived copy
“When you pay at a shop or café with your card, we keep a record of lots of relevant information about the transaction. And we use this data to do things like put your spending in the right category, and show you information in your app (like the address and logo of the merchant).”
Monzo Blog
2021Dec (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“Credit checks can be confusing (sometimes they’re even called credit searches – which only adds to the confusion). We’ve outlined what a credit check actually is, the different types you’ll find and when you might need one.”
What are credit checks or credit searches?
202315 Feb · Blog
“Pots are a great way for our customers to set money aside from their main account. Our customers open Pots for various reasons; to save towards big goals such as a house deposit or holiday, putting money aside for monthly bills, or simply accruing leftover money for a rainy day. Pots are one example at Monzo where we allow customers to use free text forms for the name, including emojis.”
Using topic modelling to understand customer saving goals

06 · Every page

All 221 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 219 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (1 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 1 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20242 pages
20238 pages
202219 pages
202119 pages
202018 pages
201933 pages
201826 pages
201720 pages
201617 pages
201513 pages
In the overall numbers, no year44 pages
Not measured2 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Monzo'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?.