Brands over time

Sage
over time

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

229 of Sage's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 89 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. 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
229
Years covered
2015–26
Archived before ChatGPT
89
Blog · press
119 · 110

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Sage's homepage from 2002 to 2025, 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.

2025sage.com2 Jul 2025
Sage homepage, 2 Jul 2025

Screenshot of Sage’s homepage (sage.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 2 Jul 2025. © Sage or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Sage.

Homepage

2025

“Powered by AI”

Page title

Sage Business Management Software and Solutions

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2006Welcome to The Sage Group plc
  2. 2015Sage and Salesforce bring big business technology, mobility, social, and cloud to the world’s small businesses.
  3. 2017Leading the Revolution into the Invisible Accounting Era
  4. 2021Thrive in today's digital world
  5. 2023Ready to see Sage 50 in action?
  6. 2025Powered by AI

20 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
9.7
11.0
11.2
15.5
13.2
14.6
16.6
14.2
15.7
13.9
13.3
14.4
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20153 pp
20165 pp
20178 pp
201819 pp
201911 pp
202014 pp
202140 pp
202222 pp
202315 pp
20245 pp
20259 pp
202625 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
20159.73
201611.05
201711.28
201815.519
201913.211
202014.614
202116.640
202214.222
202315.715
202413.95
202513.39
202614.425

Years with pages: 2015 (3), 2016 (5), 2017 (8), 2018 (19), 2019 (11), 2020 (14), 2021 (40), 2022 (22), 2023 (15), 2024 (5), 2025 (9), 2026 (25). 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 86 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 39 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 · 86 pp2024 to 2026 · 39 ppChange
Sentence length
15.114.1−7%
Sentence rhythm
0.740.71−5%
Contractions
7.98.3+6%
"You"
48%40%−7 pts
"We"
50%57%+7 pts
Questions
3.35.3+62%
Exclamations
0.190.10−44%
Long words
32%37%+5 pts
Em dashes
2.901.70−41%
AI-associated words
2.803.03+8%
AI-era marketing words
2.022.02−0%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
2.304.03+75%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.270.15−43%
Page length
9221,447+57%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (86 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (39 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

Sage 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. Contractions

    44% less than its sector

    8.5 against a sector average of 15.4; lowest of 16.

  2. "We"

    42% more than its sector

    46% against a sector average of 32%; 2nd highest of 16.

  3. Em dashes

    18% less than its sector

    2.49 against a sector average of 3.04; 6th lowest of 16.

Sentence lengthMid-table, 7th of 16
Sage 13.5
10.415.7
ContractionsLowest of 16
Sage 8.5
8.519.6
"You"3rd lowest of 16
Sage 51%
39%78%
"We"2nd highest of 16
Sage 46%
12%49%
Questions6th highest of 16
Sage 3.2
1.65.1
Long words3rd highest of 16
Sage 33%
23%34%
Em dashes6th lowest of 16
Sage 2.49
0.216.56
AI-associated wordsHighest of 16
Sage 3.27
1.033.27
Exclamations4th lowest of 16
Sage 0.39
0.155.13
Page length4th lowest of 16
Sage 949
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.

05 · Vocabulary

Words Sage 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.

finance33.2 vs 2.2
accounting50.3 vs 8.4
advice27.2 vs 2.3
payroll27.9 vs 2.5
cloud31.5 vs 3.8
reconciliation15.2 vs 0.8
construction17.8 vs 1.6
payable13.2 vs 0.5
smbs10.4 vs 0.3
margin13.6 vs 1.1
saas15.7 vs 1.8
ledger8.4 vs 0.3
SageSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 229 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.

201531 Dec · BlogArchived copy
“Construction work has taken to the skies. Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), or what we often refer to as drones, are proving useful for a variety of construction tasks—from surveying sites, to monitoring and documenting job progress, to creating snazzy marketing videos.”
Drones in construction: What you may not know
201812 Jan · BlogArchived copy
“Chatbots are big for business. Chatbots are what we call the apps of voice or text messaging platforms. Often deployed on the likes of Slack, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.25bn by 2025, with a compounded growth rate of 24.3%.”
CES 2018: How chatbots and AI can automate your processes for powerful results
2019Aug · PressArchived copy
“The total amount of economic value lost to admin in South Africa in the last 12 months totalled R7.2 billion. Productivity losses caused by unnecessary admin are costing South African businesses R229 every second of the day – a slight improvement from the R231 per second reflected in the 2018 Productivity Tracker.”
Sage launches its Internship Programme
2025 · Blog
“The nonprofit sector faces immense pressure and uncertainty in 2025. Facing an increasingly unpredictable market, nonprofit finance leaders play a pivotal role in building resilience, streamlining operations, and long-term mission success.”
2025 nonprofit technology impact report

07 · Every page

All 288 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 229 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (4 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 26 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose, 26 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.

202625 pages
20259 pages
20245 pages
202315 pages
202222 pages
202140 pages
202014 pages
201911 pages
201819 pages
20178 pages
20165 pages
20153 pages
In the overall numbers, no year53 pages
Not measured59 pages

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Sage'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?.