Brands over time

Zopa
over time

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

208 of Zopa's own blog posts, press releases and announcements, 2015 to 2026, measured sentence by sentence, 59 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
208
Years covered
2015–26
Archived before ChatGPT
59
Blog · press
189 · 19

01 · Homepage

One capture a year

Zopa's homepage from 2005 to 2024, 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.

2024zopa.com2 Jul 2024
Zopa homepage, 2 Jul 2024

Screenshot of Zopa’s homepage (zopa.com) as archived by the Internet Archive on 2 Jul 2024. © Zopa or its licensors. Shown for comparison and review; not endorsed by Zopa.

Homepage

2024

“Welcome to Zopa Bank”

Page title

Apply for a credit card or loan — Open a savings account

Open on the Internet Archive
  1. 2012Get a loan today
  2. 2016MoneySuperMarket's Best Personal Loans Provider 2016
  3. 2017Simple loans. Smart investments.
  4. 2020Welcome to FeelGood Money®
  5. 2021We turn money on its head so it works better for you
  6. 2024Welcome to Zopa Bank

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.
6
12
18
Banks avg 14.4
15.0
13.1
12.5
14.8
14.3
15.2
13.0
16.3
17.3
15.3
13.5
ChatGPT · Nov 2022
201527 pp
2016no pages
20174 pp
20183 pp
20194 pp
202020 pp
202127 pp
202218 pp
20231 pp
20246 pp
202510 pp
20269 pp
10 or more pagesFewer than 10 pages: context, not a findingSector averageChatGPT released
Show as a table
YearSentence lengthPages
201515.027
201713.14
201812.53
201914.84
202014.320
202115.227
202213.018
202316.31
202417.36
202515.310
202613.59

Years with pages: 2015 (27), 2017 (4), 2018 (3), 2019 (4), 2020 (20), 2021 (27), 2022 (18), 2023 (1), 2024 (6), 2025 (10), 2026 (9). Dates come from page metadata, structured data, the URL, or the month a page was first archived (a latest possible date).

03 · Before and after

2019 to Nov 2022 against 2024 to 2026

The same measures on 69 pages from before ChatGPT launched and 25 pages from 2024 on. A change here is a change in style. It does not show how any page was written: people used every one of these words and shapes long before 2022, and SGR-011 found most of the shift across brands was a trend already under way.

Measure2019 to Nov 2022 · 69 pp2024 to 2026 · 25 ppChange
Sentence length
14.415.1+5%
Sentence rhythm
0.700.74+6%
Contractions
19.817.7−10%
"You"
65%40%−25 pts
"We"
25%57%+32 pts
Questions
2.81.9−32%
Exclamations
1.950.28−86%
Long words
20%27%+7 pts
Em dashes
2.173.72+72%
AI-associated words
0.961.43+49%
AI-era marketing words
0.701.15+64%
Quieter LLM-favoured words
0.441.21+175%
AI-associated sentence shapes
0.200.46+131%
Page length
1,0051,039+3%

Each row is scaled to its own larger value, so rows compare within themselves, not with each other. Before = 2019 to Nov 2022 (69 pages); after = 2024 to 2026 (25 pages). Method: SGR-011.

04 · Against its sector

Zopa 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. "We"

    25% less than its sector

    35% against a sector average of 47%; 3rd lowest of 16.

  2. "You"

    22% more than its sector

    58% against a sector average of 47%; 4th highest of 16.

  3. Em dashes

    15% more than its sector

    2.66 against a sector average of 2.30; 4th highest of 16.

Sentence length5th highest of 16
Zopa 14.9
11.818.6
Contractions6th highest of 16
Zopa 17.8
9.428.7
"You"4th highest of 16
Zopa 58%
18%76%
"We"3rd lowest of 16
Zopa 35%
19%77%
QuestionsMid-table, 7th of 16
Zopa 3.1
0.65.2
Long words3rd lowest of 16
Zopa 22%
20%30%
Em dashes4th highest of 16
Zopa 2.66
1.263.96
AI-associated wordsMid-table, 7th of 16
Zopa 1.04
0.342.27
Exclamations4th highest of 16
Zopa 1.18
0.023.75
Page length5th lowest of 16
Zopa 893
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.

05 · Vocabulary

Words Zopa 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.

car22.2 vs 2.1
garden12.6 vs 0.6
loan32.2 vs 8.3
pledge10.3 vs 0.7
cashback13.2 vs 2.0
debt20.7 vs 4.9
borrowing15.1 vs 2.8
finance28.7 vs 8.5
wedding9.0 vs 1.0
peer-to-peer6.7 vs 0.1
ZopaSector peers

Uses per 10,000 words, ranked by weighted log-odds (Monroe et al. 2008) across 208 pages. Checked for product names and page furniture.

06 · 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.

201523 Jan · BlogArchived copy
“We were delighted to be named for the second year running, proud winners for Personal Loan Provider of the Year and even more amazingly Best Customer Service.”
Zopa does the double moneyfacts awards
201520 May · AnnouncementArchived copy
“We have today announced that Zopa is partnering with Metro Bank to allow the bank to lend its funds on our platform, a first of its kind in the UK.”
Zopa announces partnership with metro bank
2019 · Blog
“In addition to working on our bank launch, we also launched a number of new products and a range of innovative new features in 2019 to help people manage their money.”
2019 – Zopa’s year in the news
202322 Mar · Announcement
“Watch out big banking – Zopa has its banking licence and is set to redefine the industry once again.”
Zopa’s launching a bank

07 · Every page

All 208 pages, by year

The full list behind every number above, with links to the live page or the archived copy. 208 count towards the measures. Pages with no reliable date count in the overall numbers but in no year.

20269 pages
202510 pages
20246 pages
20231 page
202218 pages
202127 pages
202020 pages
20194 pages
20183 pages
20174 pages
201527 pages
In the overall numbers, no year79 pages

08 · Method

How this was measured

The pages

Zopa'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?.