Brands over time

Ocado
over time

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

73 of Ocado's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 9 other supermarkets, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
73
Years covered
2015–26
Archived before ChatGPT
0
Blog · press
5 · 68

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Ocado's homepage from 2002 to 2019, 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.

2019ocado.com30 Jun 2019
Ocado homepage, 30 Jun 2019

Screenshot of Ocado’s homepage (ocado.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 30 Jun 2019. © Ocado or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Ocado.

Homepage

2019

“Welcome to Ocado”

Page title

Ocado: The online supermarket

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2003Ocado - Online Supermarket Shopping
  2. 2006Ocado is the UK's favourite
  3. 2008Tesco prices. Waitrose quality. Ocado service.
  4. 2009Welcome to Ocado
  5. 2010\ Pick your own
  6. 2011Peace One Day

17 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
Supermarkets avg 16.0
8.1
6.3
7.1
9.7
9.5
9.9
7.4
9.2
7.6
8.5
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20154 pp
20161 pp
20175 pp
20181 pp
20193 pp
20202 pp
20211 pp
2022no pages
2023no pages
20242 pp
20251 pp
20263 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
20158.14
20166.31
20177.15
20189.71
20199.53
20209.92
20217.41
20249.22
20257.61
20268.53

Years with pages: 2015 (4), 2016 (1), 2017 (5), 2018 (1), 2019 (3), 2020 (2), 2021 (1), 2024 (2), 2025 (1), 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

Ocado among supermarkets

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. "You"

    70% less than its sector

    5% against a sector average of 17%; lowest of 8.

  2. Sentence length

    50% less than its sector

    8.0 against a sector average of 16.0; lowest of 8.

  3. Em dashes

    35% less than its sector

    1.46 against a sector average of 2.26; 2nd lowest of 8.

Sentence lengthLowest of 8
Ocado 8.0
8.021.2
Contractions2nd lowest of 8
Ocado 9.2
8.521.5
"You"Lowest of 8
Ocado 5%
5%58%
"We"Highest of 8
Ocado 90%
31%90%
Questions3rd highest of 8
Ocado 0.8
0.13.3
Long wordsHighest of 8
Ocado 33%
22%33%
Em dashes2nd lowest of 8
Ocado 1.46
1.064.20
AI-associated wordsHighest of 8
Ocado 1.85
0.441.85
Exclamations2nd lowest of 8
Ocado 0.30
0.141.21
Page length2nd highest of 8
Ocado 974
3363,070

Pages measured: Tesco 104 · Sainsbury's 60 · Asda 11 · Morrisons 67 · Aldi 1 · Lidl 83 · Ocado 73 · Co-op 183 · Iceland 36 · Booths 2. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Ocado 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.

results158.8 vs 4.7
technology84.8 vs 5.5
news93.3 vs 9.8
fulfilment154.9 vs 0.6
price86.0 vs 12.7
half58.3 vs 3.4
grocery59.3 vs 4.9
full62.2 vs 8.1
solutions45.3 vs 2.5
shareholder44.9 vs 1.5
platform42.2 vs 2.2
centre50.2 vs 5.6
OcadoSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 73 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.

201727 Sep · Press
“Abbazia Fiorino Prosecco d.o.c. has been named as the best value sparkling wine at leading online supermarket Ocado by money bloggers and personal finance journalists, as part of a blind taste test at the UK Money Bloggers conference in London on Saturday 23 September 2017.”
UK Money Bloggers name Ocado Prosecco as best value sparkling wine
202027 Sep · Press
“Ocado’s Remuneration Report (the “Report”) was approved at our AGM in May 2020 with 70.24% of votes in support of the resolution. The Company understands that this outcome was broadly attributable to concerns around the performance of the Growth Incentive Plan (“GIP”), the implementation of a Value Creation Plan (“VCP”), and the approach to Executive Directors’ salary progression.”
Statement on Results of AGM 2020
202620 Jul · Press
“The online grocery industry is constantly evolving. Consumer expectations have shifted dramatically, with a growing demand for a wider choice, a range of lead times, and exceptional value.”
The technology Re:Imagining online grocery

06 · Every page

All 106 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 73 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (33 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20263 pages
20251 page
20242 pages
20211 page
20202 pages
20193 pages
20181 page
20175 pages
20161 page
20154 pages
In the overall numbers, no year50 pages
Not measured33 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Ocado'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?.