Brands over time

Tesco
over time

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

104 of Tesco's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2016 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 9 other supermarkets, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
104
Years covered
2016–26
Archived before ChatGPT
0
Blog · press
2 · 102

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Tesco'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.

2026tesco.com30 Jun 2026
Tesco homepage, 30 Jun 2026

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

Homepage

2026

“All you need for the new season”

Page title

Tesco - Supermarkets | Online Groceries, Clubcard & Recipes - Tesco Groceries

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2005Available Tesco stores
  2. 2009Tesco Own Brand
  3. 2012Lifestyle & Community
  4. 2018Feeling hot hot hot!
  5. 2023Everyone is welcome at Tesco
  6. 2026All you need for the new season

24 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
Supermarkets avg 16.0
15.3
17.0
19.8
19.1
17.5
17.8
16.1
17.1
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
2015no pages
20163 pp
2017no pages
20181 pp
2019no pages
2020no pages
20211 pp
20224 pp
20234 pp
20249 pp
20257 pp
20268 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201615.33
201817.01
202119.81
202219.14
202317.54
202417.89
202516.17
202617.18

Years with pages: 2016 (3), 2018 (1), 2021 (1), 2022 (4), 2023 (4), 2024 (9), 2025 (7), 2026 (8). 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

Tesco among supermarkets

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

    65% less than its sector

    0.3 against a sector average of 1.0; 3rd lowest of 8.

  2. "You"

    43% more than its sector

    24% against a sector average of 17%; 2nd highest of 8.

  3. Em dashes

    15% more than its sector

    2.59 against a sector average of 2.26; 3rd highest of 8.

Sentence lengthMid-table, 4th of 8
Tesco 16.9
8.021.2
ContractionsMid-table, 5th of 8
Tesco 12.2
8.521.5
"You"2nd highest of 8
Tesco 24%
5%58%
"We"2nd lowest of 8
Tesco 70%
31%90%
Questions3rd lowest of 8
Tesco 0.3
0.13.3
Long words2nd lowest of 8
Tesco 25%
22%33%
Em dashes3rd highest of 8
Tesco 2.59
1.064.20
AI-associated wordsMid-table, 4th of 8
Tesco 1.40
0.441.85
Exclamations3rd lowest of 8
Tesco 0.50
0.141.21
Page lengthMid-table, 4th of 8
Tesco 761
3363,070

Pages measured: Tesco 104 · Sainsbury's 60 · Asda 11 · Morrisons 67 · Aldi 1 · Lidl 83 · Ocado 73 · Co-op 183 · Iceland 36 · Booths 2. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Tesco 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.

food135.9 vs 48.8
extra24.2 vs 2.0
black21.1 vs 2.5
farmers27.3 vs 5.0
waste31.8 vs 6.8
health35.9 vs 9.0
chocolate16.0 vs 1.6
kids14.6 vs 1.3
forces13.7 vs 0.5
summer20.5 vs 3.7
milk15.2 vs 2.2
fruit27.5 vs 6.9
TescoSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 104 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.

2016 · Press
“It’s summertime and LGBT+ Pride season is with us again. This year’s Pride in London will be a very different one to the many happy, carefree events lots of us in the LGBT+ community are used to, because of the recent awful events in Pulse, the LGBT+ nightclub in Orlando.”
London Pride 2016
201925 Mar · Press
“As a global retailer, Tesco has a crucial role in promoting healthy oceans and fish stocks, and preserving its resources for future generations.”
Tesco joins Ocean Disclosure Project
2026 · Press
“Even better, with Clubcard Prices, customers can not only enjoy certainty on the price of their monthly phone bill with frozen prices but also roam with no extra fees for the length of the minimum contract period. No setup, no hassle.”
Tesco Mobile extends EU Roaming offer to 2026

06 · Every page

All 111 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 104 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (4 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 2 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.

20268 pages
20257 pages
20249 pages
20234 pages
20224 pages
20211 page
20181 page
20163 pages
In the overall numbers, no year67 pages
Not measured7 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Tesco'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?.