Brands over time

TSB
over time

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

170 of TSB's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2025, measured sentence by sentence, 43 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
170
Years covered
2015–25
Archived before ChatGPT
43
Blog · press
39 · 131

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

TSB's homepage from 2004 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.

2026tsb.co.uk30 Jun 2026
TSB homepage, 30 Jun 2026

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

Homepage

2026

“£250 cashback? Sold!”

Page title

Personal | Life Made More | TSB Bank

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2005Helping the community Get Safe Online
  2. 2011Welcome to Lloyds TSB Bank
  3. 2016Nominate your Pride of Britain local hero.
  4. 2020How we’re supporting you.
  5. 2023Win Rugby World Cup 2023 tickets
  6. 2026£250 cashback? Sold!

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.
8
16
24
Banks avg 14.4
13.3
15.9
13.5
16.8
17.5
18.4
17.3
18.1
19.2
18.0
19.3
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
201521 pp
201613 pp
20179 pp
20184 pp
20193 pp
20202 pp
20212 pp
20222 pp
20232 pp
20243 pp
20255 pp
2026no pages
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201513.321
201615.913
201713.59
201816.84
201917.53
202018.42
202117.32
202218.12
202319.22
202418.03
202519.35

Years with pages: 2015 (21), 2016 (13), 2017 (9), 2018 (4), 2019 (3), 2020 (2), 2021 (2), 2022 (2), 2023 (2), 2024 (3), 2025 (5). 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

TSB 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. Questions

    62% less than its sector

    1.2 against a sector average of 3.0; 2nd lowest of 16.

  2. "We"

    38% more than its sector

    65% against a sector average of 47%; 2nd highest of 16.

  3. "You"

    34% less than its sector

    31% against a sector average of 47%; 3rd lowest of 16.

Sentence length4th highest of 16
TSB 15.8
11.818.6
Contractions4th lowest of 16
TSB 11.2
9.428.7
"You"3rd lowest of 16
TSB 31%
18%76%
"We"2nd highest of 16
TSB 65%
19%77%
Questions2nd lowest of 16
TSB 1.2
0.65.2
Long words5th highest of 16
TSB 27%
20%30%
Em dashes6th highest of 16
TSB 2.37
1.263.96
AI-associated words3rd lowest of 16
TSB 0.49
0.342.27
Exclamations6th lowest of 16
TSB 0.09
0.023.75
Page lengthMid-table, 7th of 16
TSB 991
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 TSB 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.

mortgage133.0 vs 22.0
customers111.9 vs 32.5
authority41.9 vs 5.5
million53.0 vs 9.1
banking101.1 vs 29.3
prudential27.3 vs 2.0
repayment24.8 vs 1.2
regulation27.5 vs 2.8
fraud38.1 vs 6.2
icon23.6 vs 2.0
telephone20.9 vs 1.6
abuse17.8 vs 1.1
TSBSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 170 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.

2024 · Press
“TSB reports a record statutory profit before tax of £290.4 million for 2024, an increase of £53.2 million (22.4%) from 2023. TSB proposes to pay a record dividend to its parent company, Sabadell.”
TSB announces 2024 financial results

06 · Every page

All 177 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 170 count towards the measures; the rest were not measured (1 pdf report (annual report, info pack), 2 under 150 words of text, 3 same text as an earlier page from this brand, 1 mostly short lines (lists, tables, link pages) rather than prose). Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20255 pages
20243 pages
20232 pages
20222 pages
20212 pages
20202 pages
20193 pages
20184 pages
20179 pages
201613 pages
201521 pages
In the overall numbers, no year104 pages
Not measured7 pages

07 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

TSB'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?.