Brands over time

Scottish Water
over time

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

16 of Scottish Water's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2023 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 9 other water companies, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
16
Years covered
2023–26
Archived before ChatGPT
0
Blog · press
0 · 16

16 pages only. The writing numbers on this page are context, not findings: there are no sector rankings or comparisons below 30 pages.

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Scottish Water's homepage from 2002 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.

2026scottishwater.co.uk19 Jun 2026
Scottish Water homepage, 19 Jun 2026

Screenshot of Scottish Water’s homepage (scottishwater.co.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 19 Jun 2026. © Scottish Water or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Scottish Water.

Homepage

2026

No headline in this capture

Page title

Home - Scottish Water

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2019Be water efficient
  2. 2020Use Water Wisely
  3. 2022Nature Calls - Our Campaign to Help Protect the Environment

8 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
Water avg 16.0
14.2
17.6
16.9
16.1
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
2017no pages
2018no pages
2019no pages
2020no pages
2021no pages
2022no pages
20232 pp
20242 pp
20256 pp
20264 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
202314.22
202417.62
202516.96
202616.14

Years with pages: 2023 (2), 2024 (2), 2025 (6), 2026 (4). 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

Scottish Water among water 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. Scottish Water has fewer than 30, so it is placed for context but not ranked. Select a dot to open that brand.

Sentence length
Scottish Water 15.9
10.720.8
Contractions
Scottish Water 14.1
6.817.1
"You"
Scottish Water 38%
3%50%
"We"
Scottish Water 57%
40%95%
Questions
Scottish Water 2.0
0.03.4
Long words
Scottish Water 30%
24%31%
Em dashes
Scottish Water 3.24
0.563.24
AI-associated words
Scottish Water 2.20
0.532.20
Exclamations
Scottish Water 1.60
0.072.62
Page length
Scottish Water 765
5141,356

Pages measured: Thames Water 106 · Severn Trent 115 · United Utilities 153 · Anglian Water 26 · Wessex Water 97 · South West Water 185 · Welsh Water 208 · Affinity Water 100 · Scottish Water 16 · South East Water 232. Measures and method: SGR-010; this sector and its brands were added by Brands over time, measured exactly as the studies measured theirs. Sector averages and ranks cover every brand in the sector on this site.

04 · 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.

2024Jan · Press
“A young woman with Down Syndrome from South Ayrshire has been praised for her passion in creating the next generation of safe and competent swimmers in Scotland.”
South Ayrshire swim teacher inspires next wave
2026Apr · Press
“Scottish Water is asking customers across the country to take measures now to enable them to use water more efficiently ahead of any extended period of dry weather that might impact supplies through the year.”
- Scottish Water

05 · Every page

All 21 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 16 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (3 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 2 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20264 pages
20256 pages
20242 pages
20232 pages
In the overall numbers, no year2 pages
Not measured5 pages

06 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Scottish Water'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?.