Brands over time

Notion
over time

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

30 of Notion's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2021 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence. 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
30
Years covered
2021–26
Archived before ChatGPT
0
Blog · press
26 · 4

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Notion's homepage from 2021 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.

2026notion.com30 Jun 2026
Notion homepage, 30 Jun 2026

Screenshot of Notion’s homepage (notion.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 30 Jun 2026. © Notion or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Notion.

Homepage

2026

“Keep work moving 24/7.”

Page title

The AI workspace that works for you. | Notion

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2021One tool for your whole team. Write, plan, and get organized.
  2. 2022One workspace. Every team.
  3. 2024Consolidate tools. Cut costs.
  4. 2025One space for every team.
  5. 2026Keep work moving 24/7.

5 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
Software avg 13.3
14.5
13.0
15.0
12.3
11.6
13.5
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
2017no pages
2018no pages
2019no pages
2020no pages
20213 pp
20221 pp
20236 pp
20246 pp
20257 pp
20266 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
202114.53
202213.01
202315.06
202412.36
202511.67
202613.56

Years with pages: 2021 (3), 2022 (1), 2023 (6), 2024 (6), 2025 (7), 2026 (6). 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

Notion 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. Em dashes

    116% more than its sector

    6.56 against a sector average of 3.04; highest of 16.

  2. "We"

    36% more than its sector

    44% against a sector average of 32%; 3rd highest of 16.

  3. Contractions

    28% more than its sector

    19.6 against a sector average of 15.4; highest of 16.

Sentence lengthMid-table, 9th of 16
Notion 13.2
10.415.7
ContractionsHighest of 16
Notion 19.6
8.519.6
"You"2nd lowest of 16
Notion 49%
39%78%
"We"3rd highest of 16
Notion 44%
12%49%
QuestionsMid-table, 9th of 16
Notion 2.9
1.65.1
Long words3rd lowest of 16
Notion 25%
23%34%
Em dashesHighest of 16
Notion 6.56
0.216.56
AI-associated words6th lowest of 16
Notion 1.58
1.033.27
Exclamations5th highest of 16
Notion 1.96
0.155.13
Page length5th lowest of 16
Notion 1,093
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 Notion 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.

block60.0 vs 1.4
offline36.5 vs 0.7
database42.8 vs 1.8
databases23.5 vs 0.6
nps18.8 vs 0.4
pgbouncer11.5 vs 0.1
blocks31.3 vs 1.7
shards15.1 vs 0.0
load18.3 vs 0.7
replication8.9 vs 0.0
use-cases15.1 vs 0.0
embeddings8.3 vs 0.0
NotionSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 30 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.

202110 Aug · Blog
“With remote work becoming the norm, we've seen a sharp increase in the number and size of companies using Notion. Many of our customers have over 1,000 people collaborating in the same space. We've seen startups ideate, fundraise, and recruit with Notion, and major enterprises deploy it wall-to-wall.”
We're SOC 2 Type 2 compliant

06 · Every page

All 34 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 30 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (4 under 150 words of text). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20266 pages
20257 pages
20246 pages
20236 pages
20221 page
20213 pages
In the overall numbers, no year1 page
Not measured4 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Notion'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?.