Brands over time

Sainsbury's
over time

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

60 of Sainsbury's's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2020 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
60
Years covered
2020–26
Archived before ChatGPT
0
Blog · press
0 · 60

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Sainsbury's's homepage from 2000 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.

2025sainsburys.co.uk1 Jul 2025
Sainsbury's homepage, 1 Jul 2025

Screenshot of Sainsbury's’s homepage (sainsburys.co.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 1 Jul 2025. © Sainsbury's or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Sainsbury's.

Homepage

2025

“Shop lower prices”

Page title

Sainsbury's

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2006Sainsbury's - Try something new today
  2. 2008Trouble getting started?
  3. 2011Party food recipes
  4. 2018Welcome to Sainsbury's home
  5. 2022Ways to shop with us at Sainsbury's
  6. 2025Shop lower prices

21 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.
8
16
24
Supermarkets avg 16.0
15.9
17.8
12.1
22.3
18.3
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
2017no pages
2018no pages
2019no pages
20201 pp
20212 pp
2022no pages
2023no pages
20242 pp
20252 pp
20261 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
202015.91
202117.82
202412.12
202522.32
202618.31

Years with pages: 2020 (1), 2021 (2), 2024 (2), 2025 (2), 2026 (1). 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

Sainsbury's 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"

    66% less than its sector

    6% against a sector average of 17%; 2nd lowest of 8.

  2. Contractions

    57% more than its sector

    21.5 against a sector average of 13.7; highest of 8.

  3. Questions

    29% less than its sector

    0.7 against a sector average of 1.0; mid-table, 4th of 8.

Sentence length2nd highest of 8
Sainsbury's 18.5
8.021.2
ContractionsHighest of 8
Sainsbury's 21.5
8.521.5
"You"2nd lowest of 8
Sainsbury's 6%
5%58%
"We"2nd highest of 8
Sainsbury's 89%
31%90%
QuestionsMid-table, 4th of 8
Sainsbury's 0.7
0.13.3
Long words2nd highest of 8
Sainsbury's 30%
22%33%
Em dashesMid-table, 5th of 8
Sainsbury's 1.77
1.064.20
AI-associated words3rd highest of 8
Sainsbury's 1.50
0.441.85
ExclamationsLowest of 8
Sainsbury's 0.14
0.141.21
Page lengthHighest of 8
Sainsbury's 3,070
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 Sainsbury's 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.

financial109.5 vs 12.2
board50.6 vs 7.7
statements56.7 vs 1.2
risk39.5 vs 2.6
million46.6 vs 8.7
cent39.2 vs 2.3
committee44.5 vs 1.4
value43.1 vs 9.5
strategy30.9 vs 3.1
assets30.6 vs 3.4
group59.5 vs 20.1
cash38.8 vs 0.8
Sainsbury'sSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 60 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.

2021 · Press
““We are making good progress delivering our plan to put food back at the heart of Sainsbury’s. We have grown market share through improving value for customers, tripling our rate of food innovation and delivering customer satisfaction ahead of our key competitors.”
Interim Results for the 28 weeks ended 18 September 2021
2024 · Press
“After months of analysis, the list has been carefully curated by Argos’s team of toy experts and contains a mix of 20 nostalgic, interactive and character-themed toys, encouraging kids to get creative and immerse themselves in the world of play.”
Argos announces annual Top Toys List for Christmas 2024

06 · Every page

All 64 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 60 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (2 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 2 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20261 page
20252 pages
20242 pages
20212 pages
20201 page
In the overall numbers, no year52 pages
Not measured4 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Sainsbury's'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?.