Brands over time

Sky
over time

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

324 of Sky's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 90 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 14 other mobile and broadband providers, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
324
Years covered
2015–26
Archived before ChatGPT
90
Blog · press
161 · 163

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Sky's homepage from 2000 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.

2026sky.com30 Jun 2026
Sky homepage, 30 Jun 2026

Screenshot of Sky’s homepage (sky.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 30 Jun 2026. © Sky or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Sky.

Homepage

2026

“Endless entertainmentSky Ultimate TV”

Page title

Discover TV, Broadband & Mobile Phone Packages with Sky

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2009Carousel - XHTML Version
  2. 2012Weekend Sports On Sky TV
  3. 2017Sky Talk Shield
  4. 2021Epic. Endless. Entertainment.
  5. 2023Sky Stream. 1 month free trial on us
  6. 2026Endless entertainmentSky Ultimate TV

23 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
Telecoms avg 13.2
13.4
13.9
15.8
15.2
16.0
20.3
18.6
14.5
12.8
17.2
13.8
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20153 pp
2016no pages
20174 pp
201818 pp
201923 pp
20209 pp
202120 pp
202218 pp
20232 pp
20244 pp
20254 pp
202622 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201513.43
201713.94
201815.818
201915.223
202016.09
202120.320
202218.618
202314.52
202412.84
202517.24
202613.822

Years with pages: 2015 (3), 2017 (4), 2018 (18), 2019 (23), 2020 (9), 2021 (20), 2022 (18), 2023 (2), 2024 (4), 2025 (4), 2026 (22). 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 70 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 30 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 · 70 pp2024 to 2026 · 30 ppChange
Sentence length
17.614.1−20%
Sentence rhythm
0.710.76+6%
Contractions
13.811.2−19%
"You"
19%39%+21 pts
"We"
74%51%−23 pts
Questions
0.81.1+37%
Exclamations
0.530.12−78%
Long words
26%25%−1 pts
Em dashes
2.951.77−40%
AI-associated words
1.660.27−84%
AI-era marketing words
0.740.14−82%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
0.620.45−27%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.240.17−30%
Page length
1,0821,076−1%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (70 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (30 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

Sky among mobile and broadband providers

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

    79% less than its sector

    0.9 against a sector average of 4.3; lowest of 13.

  2. "We"

    71% more than its sector

    57% against a sector average of 34%; 2nd highest of 13.

  3. "You"

    50% less than its sector

    30% against a sector average of 60%; lowest of 13.

Sentence length2nd highest of 13
Sky 16.0
9.716.5
Contractions3rd lowest of 13
Sky 13.1
12.725.2
"You"Lowest of 13
Sky 30%
30%84%
"We"2nd highest of 13
Sky 57%
14%57%
QuestionsLowest of 13
Sky 0.9
0.97.0
Long wordsMid-table, 7th of 13
Sky 26%
19%31%
Em dashes3rd lowest of 13
Sky 1.56
0.974.72
AI-associated words5th lowest of 13
Sky 0.92
0.462.88
Exclamations4th lowest of 13
Sky 0.22
0.162.28
Page length5th highest of 13
Sky 1,102
5111,910

Pages measured: TalkTalk 74 · Hyperoptic 46 · Community Fibre 133 · SMARTY 183 · iD Mobile 49 · Lebara 0 · Lycamobile 112 · O2 138 · Zen Internet 186 · BT 9 · Sky 324 · Virgin Media 185 · Vodafone 172 · Three 141 · giffgaff 63. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

05 · Vocabulary

Words Sky 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.

entertainment26.0 vs 3.5
original23.6 vs 1.4
series33.3 vs 8.3
sports36.6 vs 11.2
production13.2 vs 0.7
season13.7 vs 2.0
live31.4 vs 11.7
drama10.6 vs 0.8
awards14.5 vs 3.1
coming12.4 vs 2.2
channel13.8 vs 3.0
SkySector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 324 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.

07 · Every page

All 341 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 324 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (1 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 12 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose, 4 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

202622 pages
20254 pages
20244 pages
20232 pages
202218 pages
202120 pages
20209 pages
201923 pages
201818 pages
20174 pages
20153 pages
In the overall numbers, no year197 pages
Not measured17 pages

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Sky'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?.