Brands over time

Slack
over time

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

270 of Slack's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2024, measured sentence by sentence, 86 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
270
Years covered
2015–24
Archived before ChatGPT
86
Blog · press
146 · 124

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Slack's homepage from 2013 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.

2026slack.com1 Jul 2026
Slack homepage, 1 Jul 2026

Screenshot of Slack’s homepage (slack.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 1 Jul 2026. © Slack or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Slack.

Homepage

2026

“All your people and AI agents working together.”

Page title

Slack | AI Work Platform & Productivity Tools

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2013Introducing Slack: your searchable, infinite brain
  2. 2015“So yeah, we tried Slack ...”
  3. 2017Where work* happens.
  4. 2019Put collaboration at your fingertips
  5. 2023Move faster with your tools in one place
  6. 2026All your people and AI agents working together.

12 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
Software avg 13.3
14.0
19.7
12.4
14.6
13.4
14.3
16.8
19.5
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20152 pp
2016no pages
2017no pages
20182 pp
201915 pp
202023 pp
202122 pp
202224 pp
20231 pp
20241 pp
2025no pages
2026no pages
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201514.02
201819.72
201912.415
202014.623
202113.422
202214.324
202316.81
202419.51

Years with pages: 2015 (2), 2018 (2), 2019 (15), 2020 (23), 2021 (22), 2022 (24), 2023 (1), 2024 (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

Slack 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. "We"

    12% less than its sector

    28% against a sector average of 32%; 5th lowest of 16.

  2. "You"

    10% more than its sector

    68% against a sector average of 62%; 5th highest of 16.

  3. Em dashes

    6% more than its sector

    3.21 against a sector average of 3.04; 6th highest of 16.

Sentence lengthMid-table, 8th of 16
Slack 13.2
10.415.7
ContractionsMid-table, 10th of 16
Slack 15.5
8.519.6
"You"5th highest of 16
Slack 68%
39%78%
"We"5th lowest of 16
Slack 28%
12%49%
QuestionsMid-table, 10th of 16
Slack 2.9
1.65.1
Long words6th lowest of 16
Slack 28%
23%34%
Em dashes6th highest of 16
Slack 3.21
0.216.56
AI-associated wordsMid-table, 8th of 16
Slack 2.14
1.033.27
ExclamationsHighest of 16
Slack 5.13
0.155.13
Page lengthMid-table, 8th of 16
Slack 1,391
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.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Slack 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.

thanks36.1 vs 1.5
channels41.5 vs 4.4
channel25.6 vs 2.3
feedback48.1 vs 10.1
salesforce24.1 vs 2.3
work125.1 vs 55.0
productivity26.6 vs 5.7
workers14.8 vs 1.8
agentforce11.7 vs 0.2
collaboration32.4 vs 8.9
nice10.6 vs 0.7
bots10.6 vs 0.9
SlackSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 270 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.

2020Oct (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“On the first Sunday in March 2017, Monzo, a digital bank that’s forgoing brick-and-mortar branches for the convenience of people’s smartphones, suffered a rare outage. One of their critical software suppliers had gone down, which meant customers couldn’t use their prepaid cards. The fintech’s employees, no matter where or how they were spending their weekends, rushed online to help.”
Banding together on Slack to overcome an incident at Monzo
202222 Mar · PressArchived copy
“Slack is required to comply with sanctions regulations in the U.S. and other jurisdictions where we operate, including restrictions on supplying services in the recently embargoed regions of Ukraine and sanctions against Russia-related entities and individuals that have been placed on the U.S. Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list.”
Access restrictions in Russia and the recently embargoed regions of Ukraine
202229 Dec · Press
“On 29 December 2022, we were notified of suspicious activity on our GitHub account. Upon investigation, we discovered that a limited number of Slack employee tokens were stolen and misused to gain access to our externally hosted GitHub repository. Our investigation also revealed that the threat actor downloaded private code repositories on 27 December. No downloaded repositories contained customer data, means to access customer data or Slack’s primary codebase.”
Slack security update
202310 May · Press
“No one knows the details of your customers better than your CRM. What if you could get the specific account information that you’re looking for by asking simple questions? And then take action on that information instantly?”
Announcing agents and AI innovations in Slack

06 · Every page

All 290 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 270 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (1 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 16 same text as an earlier page from this brand, 3 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20241 page
20231 page
202224 pages
202122 pages
202023 pages
201915 pages
20182 pages
20152 pages
In the overall numbers, no year180 pages
Not measured20 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Slack'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?.