Brands over time

Severn Trent
over time

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

115 of Severn Trent's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2017 to 2025, measured sentence by sentence, 11 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. 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
115
Years covered
2017–25
Archived before ChatGPT
11
Blog · press
5 · 110

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Severn Trent's homepage from 2000 to 2017, 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.

2017stwater.co.uk2 Jul 2017
Severn Trent homepage, 2 Jul 2017

Screenshot of Severn Trent’s homepage (stwater.co.uk) as archived by the Internet Archive on 2 Jul 2017. © Severn Trent or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Severn Trent.

Homepage

2017

“We're improving our services”

Page title

Severn Trent Water

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2010Save water >
  2. 2012Manage your account online
  3. 2014Manage your account
  4. 2017We're improving our services

15 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
Water avg 16.0
12.2
17.7
19.1
16.5
10.5
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
20174 pp
2018no pages
2019no pages
20202 pp
2021no pages
202210 pp
20233 pp
2024no pages
20251 pp
2026no pages
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201712.24
202017.72
202219.110
202316.53
202510.51

Years with pages: 2017 (4), 2020 (2), 2022 (10), 2023 (3), 2025 (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

Severn Trent 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. Select a dot to open that brand.

  1. Questions

    90% less than its sector

    0.1 against a sector average of 1.4; 2nd lowest of 10.

  2. "You"

    52% less than its sector

    12% against a sector average of 24%; 2nd lowest of 10.

  3. Contractions

    52% more than its sector

    17.1 against a sector average of 11.3; highest of 10.

Sentence length2nd highest of 10
Severn Trent 18.6
10.720.8
ContractionsHighest of 10
Severn Trent 17.1
6.817.1
"You"2nd lowest of 10
Severn Trent 12%
3%50%
"We"2nd highest of 10
Severn Trent 84%
40%95%
Questions2nd lowest of 10
Severn Trent 0.1
0.03.4
Long words2nd lowest of 10
Severn Trent 24%
24%31%
Em dashes4th lowest of 10
Severn Trent 1.65
0.563.24
AI-associated words2nd lowest of 10
Severn Trent 0.70
0.532.20
Exclamations3rd lowest of 10
Severn Trent 0.44
0.072.62
Page lengthLowest of 10
Severn Trent 514
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 · Vocabulary

Words Severn Trent 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.

pipes53.9 vs 9.0
games14.4 vs 0.5
midlands23.3 vs 0.1
forest10.1 vs 0.3
birmingham21.8 vs 0.1
really34.3 vs 7.5
positive18.1 vs 2.6
city12.6 vs 1.3
road30.6 vs 7.0
urged6.7 vs 0.3
youngsters6.4 vs 0.1
Severn TrentSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 115 pages. Checked for product names and page furniture.

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.

06 · Every page

All 138 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 115 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (3 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 20 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20251 page
20233 pages
202210 pages
20202 pages
20174 pages
In the overall numbers, no year95 pages
Not measured23 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Severn Trent'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?.