Brands over time

Trainline
over time

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

34 of Trainline's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2019, measured sentence by sentence, 33 of them recovered from the Internet Archive. How the writing has moved over the years, how it compares with 9 other travel brands, and what it sounds like in its own words.

Pages measured
34
Years covered
2015–19
Archived before ChatGPT
33
Blog · press
16 · 18

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Trainline's homepage from 2001 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.

2026thetrainline.com30 Jun 2026
Trainline homepage, 30 Jun 2026

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

Homepage

2026

“Buy train tickets for travel in the UK and Europe”

Page title

Trainline : Search, Compare & Buy Cheap Train Tickets

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2009Get train times and tickets
  2. 2015Save up to 50% on hotels
  3. 2018Save an average of 43% when you book tickets in advance*
  4. 2019Save an average of 51% when you book in advance*
  5. 2021Explore Europe effortlessly by train and bus
  6. 2025Buy train tickets for travel in the UK and Europe

20 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.
5
10
15
Travel avg 12.6
12.1
14.8
14.0
13.1
13.9
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
20157 pp
20167 pp
20176 pp
20188 pp
20192 pp
2020no pages
2021no pages
2022no pages
2023no pages
2024no pages
2025no pages
2026no pages
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201512.17
201614.87
201714.06
201813.18
201913.92

Years with pages: 2015 (7), 2016 (7), 2017 (6), 2018 (8), 2019 (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

Trainline among travel brands

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

    30% more than its sector

    2.93 against a sector average of 2.25; 2nd highest of 6.

  2. Contractions

    30% more than its sector

    16.7 against a sector average of 12.9; 2nd highest of 6.

  3. Questions

    16% less than its sector

    1.6 against a sector average of 1.9; mid-table, 3rd of 6.

Sentence lengthHighest of 6
Trainline 13.5
11.713.5
Contractions2nd highest of 6
Trainline 16.7
3.720.4
"You"Highest of 6
Trainline 52%
21%52%
"We"2nd lowest of 6
Trainline 41%
41%64%
QuestionsMid-table, 3rd of 6
Trainline 1.6
0.74.2
Long words2nd lowest of 6
Trainline 24%
24%34%
Em dashes2nd highest of 6
Trainline 2.93
0.795.40
AI-associated wordsHighest of 6
Trainline 3.44
0.153.44
ExclamationsHighest of 6
Trainline 2.48
0.052.48
Page lengthLowest of 6
Trainline 702
7021,385

Pages measured: British Airways 16 · easyJet 23 · Ryanair 0 · Jet2 118 · Virgin Atlantic 77 · TUI 189 · Loganair 1 · Trainline 34 · National Express 1 · Eurostar 0. Measures and method: SGR-010; the brand list and sectors come from SGR-009.

04 · Vocabulary

Words Trainline 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.

tickets63.1 vs 0.9
ticket51.5 vs 0.6
rail53.4 vs 0.4
london93.3 vs 10.6
station36.0 vs 1.6
street48.3 vs 4.6
journey38.6 vs 2.9
mobile26.4 vs 1.3
advance21.9 vs 0.6
trains22.5 vs 0.9
shared25.7 vs 0.2
westminster27.7 vs 0.1
TrainlineSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 34 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.

201530 Nov · PressArchived copy
“Both advance and on-the-day rail tickets are now available for travellers to purchase and download as a mobile ticket via the Trainline App.”
Paperless rail travel launches in Norwich
2018Jun (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“We’re really excited to launch our brand-new Price Prediction tool, available now in the Trainline App. This nifty tool helps you save money by letting you know when it’s the best (and cheapest) time to book Advance train tickets.”
Get saving with Trainline’s Price Prediction tool
2019Aug (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“Time to leave Venice’s serenity behind and head to Florence. Start early and take the two-hour train from Venice to Florence. Travel in Italo’s Executive Club and you’ll have onboard catering services, perfect for breakfast on the go!”
The Italian Job
2019Aug (archived by) · BlogArchived copy
“Time to leave Venice’s serenity behind and head to Florence. Start early and take the two-hour train from Venice to Florence. Travel in Italo’s Executive Club and you’ll have onboard catering services, perfect for breakfast on the go!”
The Italian Job

06 · Every page

All 34 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 34 count towards the measures. Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20192 pages
20188 pages
20176 pages
20167 pages
20157 pages
In the overall numbers, no year4 pages
  • News and Press Office14 Jul 2014 · press · 915 words · archivedDated before 2015: in the overall numbers; the year charts start at 2015
  • News and Press Office9 Jun 2014 · press · 236 words · archivedDated before 2015: in the overall numbers; the year charts start at 2015
  • News and Press Office19 Jan 2012 · press · 1,146 words · archivedDated before 2015: in the overall numbers; the year charts start at 2015
  • On Track for a Family Vacationundated · press · 2,378 wordsNo date found: in the overall numbers, not in any year

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Trainline'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?.