Brands over time

Octopus Energy
over time

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

289 of Octopus Energy's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2016 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 86 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 11 other energy suppliers, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
289
Years covered
2016–26
Archived before ChatGPT
86
Blog · press
177 · 112

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Octopus Energy's homepage from 2017 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.

2026octopus.energy2 Jul 2026
Octopus Energy homepage, 2 Jul 2026

Screenshot of Octopus Energy’s homepage (octopus.energy) as archived by the Internet Archive on 2 Jul 2026. © Octopus Energy or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Octopus Energy.

Homepage

2026

“Join the UK's most popular energy supplier”

Page title

Octopus Energy: The UK's most awarded energy supplier

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2017Introducing Octopus Tracker: Britain's fairest energy tariff
  2. 2018We believe buying energy should be as simple as buying cornflakes.
  3. 2020Rated 5 stars for customer service from 29,529 reviews.
  4. 2021Rated 5 stars for customer service from 59,231 reviews.
  5. 2023Reasons to love Octopus Energy
  6. 2025Join the UK's most popular energy supplier

10 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
Energy avg 14.8
13.4
13.5
12.8
16.8
17.7
17.0
16.4
16.3
16.7
13.0
15.2
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
20166 pp
201710 pp
20182 pp
20198 pp
202028 pp
202128 pp
202224 pp
20236 pp
20247 pp
202510 pp
202612 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201613.46
201713.510
201812.82
201916.88
202017.728
202117.028
202216.424
202316.36
202416.77
202513.010
202615.212

Years with pages: 2016 (6), 2017 (10), 2018 (2), 2019 (8), 2020 (28), 2021 (28), 2022 (24), 2023 (6), 2024 (7), 2025 (10), 2026 (12). Dates come from page metadata, structured data, the URL, or the month a page was first archived (a latest possible date).

03 · Before and after

2019 to Nov 2022 against 2024 to 2026

The same measures on 87 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 29 pages from 2024 on. A change here is a change in style. It does not show how any page was written: people used every one of these words and shapes long before 2022, and SGR-011 found most of the shift across brands was a trend already under way.

Measure2019 to Nov 2022 · 87 pp2024 to 2026 · 29 ppChange
Sentence length
17.014.8−13%
Sentence rhythm
0.680.67−1%
Contractions
21.224.1+14%
"You"
34%36%+2 pts
"We"
50%47%−3 pts
Questions
3.15.6+82%
Exclamations
2.073.75+81%
Long words
24%22%−2 pts
Em dashes
2.454.40+80%
AI-associated words
1.431.49+4%
AI-era marketing words
1.010.90−11%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
0.790.53−33%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.240.16−32%
Page length
1,2481,195−4%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (87 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (29 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

Octopus Energy among energy suppliers

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"

    44% less than its sector

    29% against a sector average of 51%; 3rd lowest of 11.

  2. "We"

    37% more than its sector

    58% against a sector average of 42%; 4th highest of 11.

  3. Contractions

    25% more than its sector

    20.6 against a sector average of 16.5; 3rd highest of 11.

Sentence lengthHighest of 11
Octopus Energy 16.4
13.316.4
Contractions3rd highest of 11
Octopus Energy 20.6
8.024.4
"You"3rd lowest of 11
Octopus Energy 29%
28%85%
"We"4th highest of 11
Octopus Energy 58%
14%65%
QuestionsMid-table, 6th of 11
Octopus Energy 4.0
1.77.1
Long words4th highest of 11
Octopus Energy 24%
19%32%
Em dashes4th highest of 11
Octopus Energy 3.28
0.157.68
AI-associated words2nd highest of 11
Octopus Energy 1.97
0.552.62
ExclamationsHighest of 11
Octopus Energy 1.86
0.001.86
Page lengthMid-table, 5th of 11
Octopus Energy 997
6681,774

Pages measured: ScottishPower 220 · Utilita 70 · Good Energy 290 · Ecotricity 27 · Outfox the Market 0 · Fuse Energy 232 · Octopus Energy 289 · British Gas 199 · EDF 280 · OVO 157 · E.ON Next 132 · So Energy 53. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

05 · Vocabulary

Words Octopus Energy 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.

tech31.8 vs 2.8
customers77.4 vs 31.0
platform14.8 vs 1.5
agile12.4 vs 0.2
green45.2 vs 18.8
revolution8.2 vs 0.9
operations11.2 vs 2.4
global17.4 vs 5.5
Octopus EnergySector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 289 pages. Checked for product names and page furniture.

06 · 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.

20162 Aug · BlogArchived copy
“For you, it should be fast, simple, and convenient. For us… well, we like doing the complex stuff so you don’t have to.”
What happens during your switch

07 · Every page

All 295 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 289 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (1 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 1 same text as an earlier page from this brand, 1 under 150 words of text, 3 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

202612 pages
202510 pages
20247 pages
20236 pages
202224 pages
202128 pages
202028 pages
20198 pages
20182 pages
201710 pages
20166 pages
In the overall numbers, no year148 pages
Not measured6 pages

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Octopus Energy'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?.