Brands over time

Starling Bank
over time

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

298 of Starling Bank's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2017 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 17 other banks, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
298
Years covered
2017–26
Archived before ChatGPT
90
Blog · press
161 · 137

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Starling Bank's homepage from 2018 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.

2026starlingbank.com30 Jun 2026
Starling Bank homepage, 30 Jun 2026

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

Homepage

2026

“Good with money starts here.”

Page title

Starling | Award-winning bank accounts

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2018The UK mobile only bank account
  2. 2019Banking. But better.
  3. 2022With millions of accounts across the UK, someone joins Starling every 39 seconds *
  4. 2023With millions of accounts across the UK, someone joins Starling every 38 seconds *
  5. 2025Good with money
  6. 2026Good with money starts here.

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.
8
16
24
Banks avg 14.4
17.7
16.6
14.8
13.2
13.3
14.3
12.5
13.3
18.1
15.3
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
2016no pages
201716 pp
201813 pp
201918 pp
202017 pp
202116 pp
202216 pp
20231 pp
20241 pp
20251 pp
20262 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201717.716
201816.613
201914.818
202013.217
202113.316
202214.316
202312.51
202413.31
202518.11
202615.32

Years with pages: 2017 (16), 2018 (13), 2019 (18), 2020 (17), 2021 (16), 2022 (16), 2023 (1), 2024 (1), 2025 (1), 2026 (2). 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

Starling Bank among banks

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. Em dashes

    16% less than its sector

    1.93 against a sector average of 2.30; 6th lowest of 16.

  2. "You"

    13% less than its sector

    41% against a sector average of 47%; 6th lowest of 16.

  3. Contractions

    5% more than its sector

    16.6 against a sector average of 15.8; mid-table, 8th of 16.

Sentence length6th highest of 16
Starling Bank 14.9
11.818.6
ContractionsMid-table, 8th of 16
Starling Bank 16.6
9.428.7
"You"6th lowest of 16
Starling Bank 41%
18%76%
"We"Mid-table, 8th of 16
Starling Bank 47%
19%77%
Questions6th lowest of 16
Starling Bank 2.9
0.65.2
Long wordsMid-table, 8th of 16
Starling Bank 25%
20%30%
Em dashes6th lowest of 16
Starling Bank 1.93
1.263.96
AI-associated wordsMid-table, 8th of 16
Starling Bank 0.96
0.342.27
Exclamations6th highest of 16
Starling Bank 0.49
0.023.75
Page length6th lowest of 16
Starling Bank 901
5261,935

Pages measured: Metro Bank 145 · TSB 170 · Virgin Money 73 · The Co-operative Bank 40 · Chase UK 3 · Zopa 208 · Atom bank 306 · Kroo 67 · Skipton Building Society 107 · Coventry Building Society 2 · Lloyds Bank 210 · Nationwide 91 · Monzo 219 · Barclays 213 · NatWest 292 · Starling Bank 298 · Santander 114 · HSBC 111. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Starling Bank 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.

marketplace18.5 vs 0.9
app59.7 vs 18.9
card36.4 vs 10.3
account73.9 vs 30.5
certain16.9 vs 2.6
personalise14.2 vs 0.2
sole10.9 vs 0.7
google15.0 vs 2.4
business119.8 vs 64.3
personal37.1 vs 13.3
vat9.1 vs 0.8
app-based8.3 vs 0.5
Starling BankSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 298 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.

201912 Dec · BlogArchived copy
“It’s not always easy to know exactly what’s going on with your money. So here at Starling, we designed an app that makes things easier to understand. Take the homescreen for example: it shows you what you’ve spent that day (as soon as you’ve spent it), your overall balance (in real-time) as well as details of your overdraft, if you have one.”
New UK banking overdraft regulations
202227 Apr · BlogArchived copy
“As the UK emerges from the pandemic, the government is setting its sights on small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Through its flagship Help to Grow scheme, it wants them to boost productivity, grow businesses and help drive the economy’s recovery.”
Help to Grow: Government scheme to support SMEs
20232 Aug · Press
“Wednesday 2 August 2023: Half of UK adults (50%) say they overspend when holidaying abroad, with a tenth (11%) of them going into debt as a result. The ‘head in the sand’ approach to holiday spending may be responsible for travellers’ debts; just 16% of holidaymakers make a budget and stick to it, according to a survey of 2,000 UK adults by Starling Bank.”
Half of UK adults overspend on overseas trips
202511 Dec · Blog
“Are you ‘Acts of Finance’ or ‘Lifestyle Enrichment’? When talking about money, here’s why your language matters. Use our new tool to find yours.”
What’s Your Money Language? Take the Quiz

06 · Every page

All 304 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 298 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (2 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 3 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose, 1 same text as an earlier page from this brand). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20262 pages
20251 page
20241 page
20231 page
202216 pages
202116 pages
202017 pages
201918 pages
201813 pages
201716 pages
In the overall numbers, no year197 pages
Not measured6 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Starling Bank'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?.